AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)

AEO is the practice of structuring your content so AI answer engines, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews, quote you directly in their responses. Where traditional SEO optimises for a ranked list of blue links, AEO optimises for the single synthesised answer a model gives a user who never sees a results page.

For a lean B2B founder, this matters because buyers increasingly ask an AI rather than search. If your product is the one the model names when someone asks "best tool for X", you win mindshare before a click ever happens. You earn that by writing clear, factual, well-structured content (direct answers, defined terms, comparison tables, schema markup) that a model can lift cleanly. AEO doesn't replace SEO; it sits alongside it as a second front in the same content investment.