Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of getting your brand named and cited inside the answers AI assistants write, rather than ranked in a list of links. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews which product they should use, the assistant writes a short answer and cites a handful of sources. AEO is the work of becoming one of them.
A search engine returns ten links and lets the person choose. An answer engine reads the sources itself, writes a paragraph, and names two or three of them. The person often never sees a list at all.
That single difference is the whole of AEO. Ranking fourth on a results page still puts you in front of someone. Being the fourth-best source for an AI answer usually means you are not in the answer, because the answer only had room for three.
Nobody outside these companies knows the exact weighting, and anyone claiming a formula is guessing. What is observable, by asking the engines and reading which sources they cite, is that a few things come up repeatedly.
It applies if your buyers ask questions before they buy, and if there is more than one reasonable answer to those questions. Software, professional services, tools, agencies and most considered purchases fit. A local business people find by proximity mostly does not.
The fastest way to find out is not to read about it. Open ChatGPT, ask the question your best customer would have asked before they found you, and see whose name comes back. If it is not yours, there is usually a specific reason.
Citeon runs the questions your customers actually ask across six AI engines, records which brands get cited and which sources those citations point to, and shows you the prompts where a competitor is named and you are not. It then generates the content, schema and llms.txt entries for closing that specific gap.
You can do the monitoring part by hand. Most people start that way, and it is worth doing once so the problem stops being abstract. It becomes impractical at the point where you care about more than a handful of prompts, or want to know whether anything you published actually changed the outcome.
No, though they overlap. SEO tries to rank a page in a list of links. AEO tries to get a brand named inside a written answer, where there is no list and usually only two or three sources are cited. A page can rank well in Google and never be cited by ChatGPT, because the two systems are choosing different things for different reasons.
Nothing meaningful. Answer Engine Optimisation and Generative Engine Optimisation describe the same practice, and different companies picked different names for it at roughly the same time. Some people also call it LLM optimisation or AI search optimisation.
No. Most AI engines still lean heavily on conventional search results when deciding what to cite, so pages that rank well are more likely to be reachable in the first place. AEO is additional work on top, not a replacement.
Ask it. Put the questions your customers would ask into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews, and note whether you appear and who does instead. Doing this once by hand is free and tells you more than any theory. Doing it continuously across engines and markets is the part that needs a tool.
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