Definition
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) covers the structural, schema, and content practices that make a page legible to LLM-backed answer engines, ChatGPT Search, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar, so that when a user asks a question those engines cite the source by name.
Why it matters
The share of information-gathering queries answered by an LLM surface rather than a ten-blue-links SERP is growing every quarter. A page that ranks on Google but is not citable by ChatGPT loses the entire LLM-search funnel. AEO is the companion discipline to classic SEO, not a replacement, but the newer half of the job.
How we think about it
We publish llms.txt, serve structured FAQs on every page, invite AI crawlers explicitly in robots.txt, ship full Article + Organization + Person schema on every indexable asset, and write short, cite-able paragraphs LLMs can lift as quoted answers. For clients we ask the questions their customers ask, every week, and count the answers that name them: the AI search equivalent of rank tracking.