What is AEO? A plain guide

AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of getting your brand mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best CRM for a startup, the answer names a few brands. AEO is how you become one of them.

You will also see it called GEO (generative engine optimization) or LLMO. They mean the same thing. The answer engines that matter most today are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot.

SEO competes for positions in a list of links. AEO competes for mentions inside an answer. In classic search, the buyer clicks and compares. In an AI answer, the comparison is already done and the shortlist is made before anyone visits a site.

AEO does not replace SEO. It builds on the same foundations: useful content, authority and a site that is easy to crawl. AI assistants often run web searches behind their answers and lean on the pages that rank, so a site that is invisible in search is usually invisible in AI too.

AI assistants name the brands that the web describes most clearly and most often for a topic. Three things drive it.

1. Search behind the answer. Tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Mode often split a question into several web searches, called fan-out queries, and read the pages that come back.
2. Mentions across the web. In a study of 75,000 brands, mentions across the web had a 0.664 correlation with visibility in Google AI Overviews. Backlinks had 0.218 (Ahrefs, 75,000 brands, May 2025).
3. Fresh, clear pages. Pages cited by AI assistants were on average 25.7% fresher than Google's organic results (Ahrefs, 17M cited URLs, July 2025).

AI answers are also probabilistic: the same question can name different brands from one run to the next. That is why you measure AEO across many runs, not by checking one answer.

Start with the topics closest to a sale, make your own pages answer them plainly, then get named on the pages AI reads.

1. Pick topics, not single prompts. List the questions buyers ask before they buy, group them into topics, and check the search demand behind each one.
2. Build or fix your money pages first. Pricing, comparison and “best tool for” pages sit closest to a sale. One strong page can answer several related questions.
3. Put the answer first. Start every section with the answer, then the detail. Make each section make sense on its own, because AI reads pages in chunks.
4. Name things clearly. Use your brand, product, category, competitors and use cases by name, in short, plain sentences.
5. Get named off-site. Find the Reddit threads, YouTube videos, review sites and listicles that rank for your topic, and earn a mention honestly. Never spam communities.
6. Make your site readable for AI. Allow AI search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot in robots.txt, make sure key text does not need JavaScript to appear, keep pages fast, and add structured data.

Measure how often AI names you across many answers, by topic, and track the pages AI reads. Useful numbers are AI visibility (how often and how prominently you are named), mention rate, average position, how often your own pages are cited, and how often ranking pages mention you.

Be careful with “prompt volume”. No AI company publishes how often a prompt is asked, so any volume number is an estimate. Search demand behind a topic is a more reliable guide.

Off-site mentions can change within days. AI citations usually take weeks. A new mention on a ranking Reddit thread or review page shows up as soon as the page is updated. AI answers shift more slowly, as assistants recrawl and re-rank sources.

That is why it helps to track a number that moves early, such as how often ranking pages name you, alongside AI visibility.

• Mass-producing AI pages. Thin, repeated content tends to hurt you in both Google and AI answers.
• Chasing one prompt at a time. Single prompts are noisy. Work at the level of topics.
• Blocking AI crawlers by accident. Check robots.txt and your CDN or firewall settings.
• Hiding content behind JavaScript. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so text that only appears after scripts load may never be read.
• Spamming Reddit. Communities and moderators notice, and it can damage your brand. Earn mentions instead.

Related: how Selka measures AI visibility and AI visibility tools compared.