Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

Answer engine optimisation is the practice of making your content easy for AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews) to pull from when they answer a user's question directly. Where classic SEO chases a ranked link a person clicks, AEO chases the citation inside the synthesised answer the person reads instead.

For a lean founder this matters because buyer behaviour is shifting. A growing share of research now happens inside a chat box that never sends a click to your site, so being the source the model quotes becomes the new front page of Google. You win by writing clear, factual, well-structured answers to the exact questions your buyers ask, backing them with data and entities a model can trust, and earning mentions across the wider web. Track which engines cite you and for which prompts, then double down on the gaps.