Glossaire
AEO: Get Your Content Cited by AI Answers
Answer engines like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews pick sources for direct answers. Learn how AEO helps your content get chosen instead of ignored.
Definition
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimising content for answer engines: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Where classic SEO aims to rank a page in a list of results, AEO aims to be the cited source when an engine composes a direct answer to a question.
Why it matters
More and more users get their answer without clicking a result: the engine writes it for them, drawing on a few sources. Not being one of those sources means being invisible on those queries, even if your page ranks well in the blue links. AEO addresses this shift.
In practice
- Answer the precise question in the first one or two sentences of the page.
- Structure content as questions and answers (interrogative headings, FAQ).
- Use structured data (schema.org) to help engines extract the answer.
- Cite verifiable facts and real sources, which signal reliability to an AI.
- Stay factual and concise: an extractable answer beats a long, vague text.