There’s an acronym making the rounds in marketing meetings, and it’s giving executives something new to panic about and me heartburn every time I hear them mention it: AEO. Answer Engine Optimization.
This is the idea that now that ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are answering people’s questions directly, or in AI overviews, you need a whole new strategy to show up there.
Here’s the boring thing nobody wants to hear: if you’ve been doing SEO right, you’re already doing AEO. The strategy hasn’t changed. Here’s why that is and how you can get the algorithms to work for you. Without an “AEO strategy.”
What SEO, AEO, and GEO Actually Mean
Let’s get the definitions out of the way quickly, because the terminology is where some of the confusion lives.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is what you’ve been doing for twenty years — creating content structured and written well enough that Google surfaces it when someone searches a relevant query. It includes everything that helps you show up on SERPs (search engine results pages) like on-page optimizations, updating your sitemap, and even just writing about the things that your audience is searching for.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of creating content structured and written well enough that AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity cite it or summarize it when someone asks a relevant question.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is essentially the same thing as AEO, with a different acronym because corporate executives needed a third one to circle back or double-click on.
The operational difference between these three is smaller than the industry wants you to believe. Every one of them is asking the same underlying question: does your content directly and clearly answer what the person searching is actually looking for?
Why Executives Keep Getting This Wrong
They’re busy and don’t have the time or energy to fact check or argue with their SEO agency about it. Plus, most non-marketing leaders don’t see this as a critical function in their marketing org (despite it arguably being the most critical).
The reason “we need an AEO strategy” sounds urgent and important is that it implies the old rules no longer apply and everything you built needs to be rebuilt. Five alarm fire on your website and subsequently your business.
But that’s not what happened. What happened is that the interface between a person’s question and your content got a new layer. Google used to show you ten blue links; now it also gives you an AI-generated summary at the top. ChatGPT doesn’t primarily show links at all. It synthesizes an answer and maybe cites a few sources in tiny little boxes next to the point it’s making. The format is different, but the fundamentals of what earns a citation are not.
All search algorithms — Google, Bing, every LLM powering an answer engine — are and always will be optimized for one thing: serving the person asking the question (explicit or implicit) with the content that best answers it.
Full. Fucking. Stop.
Search engines measure this in signals.
- How many authoritative sources link to your page?
- Do people who find your content through a specific search stay on it?
- Do they come back or share it?
The measurement tools get better every year, but the conclusion they are looking for is the same: did someone actually want to read this and did they like it?
You cannot outsmart that in the long run. You can only earn it.
And when you earn it, the algorithms will work for you. Each update will grow your authority, as these tools all help people find your content more easily.
Don’t be a plastic bag, drifting in the internet wind. Be like water and flow with it instead.
Bruce gets it.
What Actually Gets You Cited — In Any Search Engine or LLM
The things that help you rank in AI-generated answers are the same things that have always helped you rank in search. And they’re the same things that help you rank because they’re actually good, not just because you keyword stuffed the shit out of your “totally legit” post on the “best software for business owners” that ranks you #1 despite no one every having heard of you before.
Here’s how you can actually show up in search results and AI overviews:
Write website content that directly and clearly answers questions.
Not “covers a topic.” Answers a specific question that a real person is actually asking. If someone searches “how do I build an AEO strategy,” they want a direct answer, not three paragraphs of throat-clearing before you get to it.
They also don’t want generic bullshit. Tell them the concrete steps they can take to achieve the results you’re promising or how you solve their problem (if it’s a product page).
Organize your headings/schema well.
Again, technical SEO often just follows what makes it easier for humans to consume your content more easily. Don’t make every line an H2. Don’t write a block of paragraph text for the entire post. Just use this tool to make your content easy to read and understand.
Cite reliable sources and include accurate information.
LLMs are trained to synthesize trustworthy sources. Google has been rewarding E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness) for years. This is the same thing.
Earn domain and page authority.
High authority doesn’t happen because you completed a technical checklist. It happens because you’ve been producing content worth linking to, worth citing, worth reading, for long enough that the internet has noticed. There’s no shortcut that works long-term.
Once Google or Claude realizes that you’ve set up a fake website to post gen-AI listicles on that link back to your site, those backlinks will become toxic and potentially wreck your DA over time. Black hat SEO tactics are rarely worthwhile or necessary.
Use visuals that actually work.
Charts and comparison tables help LLMs extract and summarize information quickly. They also help humans understand information quickly. These are not two different goals. The reason AI tools prefer structured visual data is the same reason readers prefer it: t’s faster and clearer than reading four paragraphs to compare five things.
Write alt text like a human. (And just have good accessibility practices.)
Not “keyword keyword product-name keyword.” Write it so that if the image fails to load, or a screen reader is reading your page to someone who needs it, the description is useful. Search engines have always rewarded this. Answer engines do too. You know who rewards it most? The person who can’t see your image.
Same goes for color combinations (keep color-blindness in mind), font sizes/shapes, and anything else that you think could support the largest possible number of your audience members actually reading your content.
Include FAQs when they’re genuinely useful.
An FAQ section built around questions people are already asking earns featured snippets, powers AI summaries, and helps readers find what they need. An FAQ section built to stuff your product name into those queries doesn’t do any of those things and actively makes your content worse to read.
Offer a perspective that isn’t already written five hundred times.
Generic insight is not insight. If your content is a slightly different arrangement of what every other article on the topic already says, an LLM has no reason to cite it over the more authoritative original. Neither does a reader.
The Part About “Serving Readers First” That Isn’t a Platitude
There’s a version of “write for humans” that has become its own kind of hollow content advice repeated so many times it stopped meaning anything. So let me be specific about what it actually means here.
Serving readers first means you’re writing to the person who found your article because they had a specific problem, not to your VP of Marketing who wants to see your brand new, made-up product name in the H2 instead of what it actually is/does. It means your intro doesn’t just announce what the article is about to cover it gets to the point or sets the table intentionally, because the person who clicked is already there and they’re already waiting. It means your conclusion doesn’t restate everything you just said, it tells them what to do next, because they read it and now they need a next step.
When you write for internal stakeholders instead of readers, the content fails at everything: it doesn’t rank, it doesn’t get cited, it doesn’t convert, and no one reads it. The irony is that the only way to satisfy the executive who wants rankings is to stop writing content that satisfies executives. And I am a BIG fan of disappointing logically-challenged authority figures (at least short-term).
How to Rank in AI Overviews
If you want to show up in AI-generated answers — on Google, in ChatGPT, in Perplexity, wherever — here’s what the evidence actually supports:
Answer the question clearly in the first paragraph. Don’t bury it. AI tools summarize content, and they start at the top.
Structure your content so a machine can follow it. Headers, subheaders, and logical section breaks aren’t just good UX. They’re how LLMs parse your content and determine what you’re actually saying about what.
Build domain authority through consistent, quality publishing over time. This takes longer than anyone wants it to. It’s also the only thing that works.
Get cited and linked to by authoritative sources. Write something worth citing. Publish original research, original perspectives, or explanations of things that weren’t explained well anywhere else.
Make sure your technical fundamentals aren’t getting in the way. Page speed, structured data, clean markup, mobile-friendliness. These don’t create rankings, but they stop your content from being penalized before anyone reads it.
None of this is an AEO strategy. It’s a content strategy. One that happens to work for AEO because it works for SEO because it works for humans, and all of those things are ultimately measuring the same thing.
Fuck Your “AEO Strategy”
The companies that chase every new update or algorithm without fixing the underlying content problem are going to spend a lot of money on consultants and produce the same crappy content (hah) they were producing before, just with new, fancy terminology around it.
The companies that use “AEO” as a lever to finally commit to content that’s useful to real people (clear, specific, accurate, and structured well) are going to do fine long-term. In Google. In ChatGPT. In whatever comes after ChatGPT. Elon’s brain implants, or whatever.
Yes, the answer engine has changed. The answer to “how do you rank in it” has not.
Write something worth reading.
Do it consistently.
Build a track record of being right and useful.
It’s hard to do, but it’s not hard to strategize around. Quit overcomplicating it.
Then watch every algorithm optimize for you instead of refreshing the same blog posts 10x per year or every time Google/Claude/OpenAI drop an update.
You can thank me later.