What is Answer Engine Optimization?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the work of making your business the answer an AI assistant gives, rather than one link among ten that a search engine returns.
When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity for a dentist, a lawyer or a restaurant, the assistant answers in a sentence or two and names a handful of businesses. There is no page two. AEO is everything you do so that one of those names is yours: the evidence you publish, the places that evidence lives, and the way it is written.
The same discipline travels under other names: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) describe the same work with different emphasis. If you are comparing the terms, we keep an honest side-by-side on AEO vs GEO vs SEO and short definitions in the glossary.
Search is now an AI answer, not a list of links.
Every number below is published research, with its source named. We do not invent statistics, on this page or in your report.
800M+
people use ChatGPT every week, and a growing share ask it what to buy and who to trust.
Source: OpenAI, Oct 2025
A handful
of businesses fit in a typical AI recommendation. There is no page two.
Source: Observed across answer engines
133 vs 11
Google reviews: the average for businesses AI recommends, against the average for the ones it ignores.
Source: Insites study of 10,000 businesses
82%
of AI citations point to third-party sites, not to the business's own website.
Source: Muck Rack citation analysis
-25%
forecast drop in traditional search volume as customers move to AI assistants.
Source: Gartner, 2024 forecast
~11%
of cited domains overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity. Each assistant reads its own corner of the web.
Source: Profound, 100,000-prompt study
Four levers, ranked by evidence.
Published research, not folklore. This is the order of what works, and it is the order your report follows.
01
Biggest lever
Be cited where assistants read
82% of what AI cites about a business comes from sites the business does not own (Muck Rack, 1M+ citations). Directories, comparison sites and local press move answers more than your homepage does.
02
Strong
Publish real numbers
Pages with concrete statistics are cited about 41% more, and citing external sources lifts lower-ranked pages by up to 115% (Princeton and Georgia Tech, KDD 2024). Word count alone measured no effect.
03
Strong, and slow
Build the review count
Businesses AI recommends average 133 Google reviews; the ones it ignores average 11 (Insites, 10,000 businesses). Reviews are slow, unglamorous and completely fixable.
04
A gate, not a lever
Be readable to machines
Crawlability is a gate: a robots.txt that blocks GPTBot or ClaudeBot silences everything else you do. Structured data and question-shaped pages then make you quotable, and the same work still counts in Google.
Just as important is what does not work: alt text, heading counts and page structure tweaks are classic SEO hygiene, and for local questions the Insites study found schema and llms.txt effects marginal on their own. Anyone selling those as the whole answer is selling the easy part.
Nobody controls the answer. Including us.
We will not promise you a ranking. Nobody controls what an assistant says. What AEO can do is change the evidence the assistants draw on, and what an honest provider does is measure the answer before and after, so you watch it move rather than take anyone's word for it. That is the whole method: find the questions you lose, publish the evidence that changes them, check again every week.
Nobody can guarantee what an assistant says. We can prove whether yours changed.
Every fix you publish is re-checked the following Monday. Before and after, side by side.
See your own answers, not a definition.
The fastest way to understand AEO is to read what the assistants say about you today. Free, about two minutes, and every finding is visible before you pay anything.
Find out if AI recommends you.
Paste your website. See the actual answers, and who gets named instead of you. Free, no signup.
Show me who AI recommends