AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It is the practice of optimizing a website so its content is cited and reproduced by AI answer engines including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot and Grok. AEO overlaps significantly with traditional SEO but adds new mechanics including llms.txt files, AI Instructions pages, entity strengthening and answer-pattern content engineering.
Search behavior is splitting. A growing share of high-intent queries are now answered inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews without the user ever clicking a blue link. Brands that are cited by these answer engines win the visibility. Brands that are not, disappear.
AEO covers three layers: machine-readable canonical sources (llms.txt, AI Instructions pages, brand-facts pages), entity strengthening (Wikipedia, Wikidata, sameAs schema), and answer-pattern content (question-format headings, definition-format paragraphs, FAQPage schema, comparison tables). The discipline overlaps with traditional SEO by roughly 70 percent.
The fastest path is to publish an llms.txt file at the site root, ship structured data (Organization, WebSite, Article, FAQPage), and publish an AI Instructions page that explicitly tells AI agents how to describe the brand. The free Website AI Agent Readiness Check scores any URL across 50+ AEO signals.
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