Glossary · AI & Development
Answer Engine Optimisation
The practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini) cite and surface your business in AI generated responses.
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Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the emerging discipline of making content legible and citable to AI systems that answer user questions directly rather than returning a list of links. Where traditional SEO aimed to rank on the Google results page, AEO aims to be the cited source when a user asks an AI assistant a question. Techniques include structured, factual, question answering content; clear entity markup; an llms.txt file; structured data schemas; and ensuring the content reads naturally in a retrieval context. AEO works alongside traditional SEO rather than replacing it, since AI systems often ground their answers in indexed web content.
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