Key takeaways
- Answer engine optimisation (AEO) improves a brand's visibility on AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity AI, by earning mentions, citations and placements in conversational answers.
- AEO differs from SEO because it focuses on answer engines and conversational questions, while SEO focuses on search engines and keywords.
- AEO matters because search behaviour is changing: Gartner predicted that 25% of search volume would move to AI chatbots and virtual agents by 2026.
- Adopting AEO early helps companies gain visibility on AI platforms, win new leads and open new revenue opportunities.
- Tracking citations and optimising for several AI models make AEO more demanding than SEO.
- Companies can start by creating authoritative content, adding schema markup, building backlinks and monitoring mentions with the help of AI SEO specialists.
What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) improves a brand's visibility in AI-powered answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity AI and Microsoft Copilot. The most common optimisations for earning mentions and citations in these engines are content creation, schema markup and backlinks.
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
There are a few differences between AEO and search engine optimisation (SEO), including:
| AEO | SEO | |
| Platform | Answer engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity AI and Microsoft Copilot | Search engines such as Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo |
| User targeting | Conversational questions, such as "What are some good restaurants in Iceland?" | Keywords of one to several words, such as "best restaurants iceland" |
| Metrics | Mentions Citations Placements Referral traffic Conversions | Domain authority Rankings Impressions Traffic Conversions |
That said, the two have some things in common:
- Goal: better visibility is the point of both SEO and AEO. Whether it is traditional Google results or AI-generated answers in ChatGPT, companies want to reach people searching online.
- Tactics: both approaches use similar tactics, such as producing original content, earning trustworthy, natural backlinks and targeting specific phrases, which is why it is worth practising SEO and AEO.
- Skills: from content creation to audience research and data analysis, answer engine optimisation and search engine optimisation rely on many of the same skills to improve brand visibility.
Read more: AEO vs SEO: key differences and why both matter in digital marketing
Why does answer engine optimisation matter?
Answer engine optimisation matters because search is changing. Between AI platforms and AI assistants, people have several options for researching problems, discovering brands and buying products.
This shift is the reason to optimise for search everywhere, making sure content is accessible and relevant across different platforms.
Several recent studies show the change:
- More than 400 million people use OpenAI products every week (Source)
- Downloads of the Bing mobile app grew fourfold after AI was integrated (Source)
- 45% of Millennials use social media to search (Source)
- By 2026, 25% of search volume will move to AI chatbots and other virtual agents (Source)
Answer-driven sites such as Stack Overflow saw this change in user behaviour first-hand. After ChatGPT launched, visits to the site fell by 14% in March 2023 and by 18% in April 2023.
Yet while some companies are losing organic traffic, their revenue is growing.
NerdWallet, for example, grew its revenue by more than 35% in 2024, while monthly website traffic dropped by 20%. Rising revenue alongside falling traffic suggests people are still buying, they are just buying differently.
That is why the companies changing strategy now are working to:
- Get ahead of competitors early
- Increase brand visibility across online channels, from social to search to AI
- Support business growth, for example through more leads or more revenue.
Is answer engine optimisation worth it?
Yes.
Our SEO agency has run hundreds of search engine optimisation campaigns and has seen this strategy work for companies in many sectors, from business-to-consumer (B2C) to business-to-business (B2B).
Visibility in answer engines can pay off organically and, potentially, through the advertising opportunities answer engines are starting to offer.
That does not mean answer engine optimisation is easy.
Like search engine optimisation, it has its own challenges, and in some ways it is harder than SEO.
What makes AEO difficult?
Answer engine optimisation is demanding for several reasons. Here are the main ones.
1. Performance tracking
Search engine optimisation has free and paid tools such as Google Search Console, Ahrefs and Semrush for tracking performance. Answer engine optimisation does not have equivalent resources yet.
At most, these platforms support tracking of AI Overviews and featured snippets, and they have limits:
| Platform | Limitation |
| Google Search Console | Combines AI Overviews data with all other search data, with no way to filter it |
| Ahrefs | Tracks AI Overviews data, but focuses on keywords rather than conversational questions |
| Semrush | Tracks AI Overviews data but, like its competitor Ahrefs, focuses on SEO keywords rather than AEO questions. |
A free alternative is to search and log citations and mentions by hand, as in the example below:
| Target question | Date | ChatGPT | Claude |
| What are some good restaurants in Iceland? | 2/2/2025 | Mentioned | Cited |
| What are some of the best restaurants in Reykjavík? | 2/2/2025 | None | None |
2. Getting internal buy-in
Marketing teams may also struggle to get internal approval to put resources into answer engine optimisation. AEO does not replace SEO, so companies have to invest more, or reallocate budget, to support it.
Solving this takes good communication.
There is plenty of data supporting the case for answer engine optimisation, but you need to tell a story with it. Gartner predicted that search engine volume would fall by 25% by 2026, but what does that mean for the business?
What share of revenue comes from organic traffic? If the company wants to hold its performance and grow, how will it make up for lost revenue? Is the organisation already present on other channels, such as YouTube, LinkedIn and third-party sites?
AI engines, from Meta's assistant to Anthropic's Claude, offer a new channel for reaching, engaging and retaining users. Companies that answer engines do not mention risk staying invisible, just like companies that do not appear on the first page of search results.
3. Optimising for several answer engines
Most search engine optimisation campaigns focus on a single search engine: Google. That is not the case with answer engine optimisation, which works on visibility across several engines (and their different models), such as:
- ChatGPT
- Claude
- Gemini
- Perplexity AI
- Meta AI
- Microsoft Copilot.
These engines generate and return results in similar ways, but each one is different and plays its own part in reaching users. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, for example, are closer to each other than ChatGPT and Gemini, because Copilot is built on OpenAI's GPT models.
Besides managing (and tracking) visibility on these engines, SEO specialists also need to raise their game.
For years Google has stressed that content should be helpful, pushing creators to publish authoritative content that adds something unique to search results. Answer engines ask creators, and SEOs, to go further.
We cover this in more detail in the how-to section below. For now, the point is that these engines reward specificity. Generic advice anyone could give, such as "Write a compelling title tag", will no longer be enough.
How does answer engine optimisation work?
To understand how to optimise for answer engines, you first need to understand how these tools work.
AI engines are built by training models on datasets (a little like the data held in a search engine's index). OpenAI, for example, used publicly available data and licensed information from third-party partners to train its ChatGPT models.
25% of the highest-quality sources in the datasets used to train AI models have restricted their use for future training. That makes it even more important for companies to publish original, authoritative content in their sector.
As part of their training, these models learn to "predict the next most likely word that might appear in response to a user request, and each subsequent word after that". As OpenAI explains, for the sentence "instead of turning left, she turned ___", the AI might suggest "right", "around" or "back".
So what does this mean for an SEO?
Just as SEOs contribute to a search engine's index in traditional search, they now need to contribute to an AI model's dataset. That way, when someone asks ChatGPT "What are some good restaurants in Iceland?", your brand is the most likely next word.
There are several ways to contribute to an AI model's dataset, including:
| Source | Data provided |
| Local listing | Name Address Opening hours Reviews Menu |
| Third-party sites | Name Address (or general location) Reviews Rankings (for example, second-best restaurant in Iceland) Recognition (awards, certifications, etc.) |
| Your website | Name Address Reviews Menu Awards |
To learn how to optimise this content, read the how-to section below.
How long does answer engine optimisation take?
Answer engine optimisation can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months to show results. Results depend on the SEO work already done on the website and, in our experience, our AEO services help clients get results faster by building on established best practice.
SEO matters here because sites that have done it have already worked on:
- Being discoverable by search and answer engine crawlers
- Publishing relevant content on common topics in their sector
- Building an authoritative, consistent backlink profile
- Claiming local listings and social media profiles.
If search engine optimisation is a new investment for your organisation, consider putting your resources there first. Once you have learned the basics, start moving part of your budget into answer engine optimisation.
How to get started with answer engine optimisation
Here is how to start optimising for answer engines.
1. Set goals and KPIs
To begin, decide:
- Which goals will define success
- Which metrics will measure performance
Because answer engine optimisation is a newer strategy with some limitations (reporting, for one), we recommend modest goals, such as earning 1-2 mentions for a set of related questions, perhaps starting from an FAQ section built around those questions, and metrics that are easy to access, such as citations, mentions and referral traffic.
Consider setting goals on a two-month or quarterly timeline. That should give you some early data, such as how much referral traffic comes from answer engines, which you can use to build support for AEO work.
2. Develop a strategy
Next, put together an initial strategy, starting with a few research steps:
- Audit the site's existing SEO
- Research the conversational questions to target
- Find out which engines your target market prefers, such as Meta AI or Claude
- Analyse competitors' visibility.
Use this data to decide where to focus your team's time and resources (or your own).
For example, given your target audience, is visibility on Meta AI the priority? Or do you need to fix some SEO issues before starting on AEO? And which optimisations need the most attention and time? (More on this below.)
P.S. Before you start, set up AEO tracking in your website analytics platform, such as GA4.
In Google Analytics this means creating a custom channel group with a channel for:
- Referral traffic
- Answer engine traffic
You can separate answer engine traffic from existing referral traffic with a few regular expressions (ask ChatGPT or another AI platform to help). Just remember to update the regular expressions when new AI platforms, such as DeepSeek, appear.
3. On-site optimisation
The most effective on-site optimisations for AEO include:
| Area | Optimisation |
| Discoverability / crawlability | Allow search and answer engines to crawl and index your pages Create an XML sitemap Add 3-5 internal links to every URL on the site |
| Content | Use headings, lists, short paragraphs and images to improve the user experience. Add specific instructions, anecdotes or quotes. Publish studies or reports based on internal data, surveys or third-party research. Add schema markup for content such as recipes, FAQs and articles. Include original media, such as charts, videos or GIFs, to explain concepts, highlight results and walk through steps. |
4. Off-site optimisation
The most effective off-site optimisations for AEO include:
| Area | Optimisation |
| Backlink profile | Promote authoritative content (such as a study based on internal data) through social media, email or ads. Contact publishers to earn a place on relevant pages, such as a round-up of the best places to eat in Iceland. Build tools relevant to your sector, such as calculators, generators or problem-solving tools. |
| Local directories | Work on local directories such as Google Business Profile. Complete local listings with name, address and phone number. List the services, products and/or service area you cover (where relevant). |
| Social media | Create or claim social media profiles, including on newer networks. Fill in social profiles with core business information, such as name, website and address. Post regularly on the platforms your target audience uses most. |
| Review management | Create profiles on trusted review sites, such as Trustpilot, Yelp or G2. Invite customers to leave reviews by email or with an incentive, such as a gift card or discount (Note: some platforms, such as Google Business Profile, prohibit incentivised reviews) |
5. Measure performance
In most cases, companies track AEO performance like this:
- Search for the conversational phrase in an answer engine
- Check and log whether the company is cited or mentioned
- Repeat the process in other answer engines.
It takes time, but it has to be done.
You will also need to set aside time to judge whether your optimisations are working.
If nothing has changed after your optimisations, run a competitor analysis to work out what makes answer engines more likely to cite those competitors. Do they have more original content, for example, or more authoritative mentions?
Do the same when you do earn citations or mentions. Which optimisations did the team complete? How does the cited content compare with the other citations, and what could make it better?
Working this way keeps your organisation a step ahead of competitors.
Read more: How to rank in answer engines.
Related resource: see the best AI visibility tools in 2025 to find out how brands are measuring and improving their presence on AI platforms and in AI search.
Get found in answer engines with AEO and SEO
You now know the basics of answer engine optimisation and how it relates to SEO. The next step is growing your brand's presence on ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity AI and other tools.
If you need professional help to bring SEO and AI together, get in touch.
