Answer engine optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization is the work of being the single direct answer to a question rather than one of ten links. It predates the current AI wave: if you optimised for featured snippets and voice results, you have done AEO. What has changed is the stakes, because the extracted answer now frequently resolves the question entirely.
The problem
Being the answer, not an option
When a system extracts one answer, second place is worth nothing. That is a harsher equilibrium than ranking and it rewards a specific kind of writing: direct, early, structured and unambiguous.
Most commercial pages are built to persuade, which means they build towards a conclusion. An extraction system reads the top of the section and moves on so a page that saves its answer for the end is a page that does not get used.
What you get
Deliverables
Written into the engagement, not implied by it.
- Question research: how your buyers actually phrase it, not keyword stems
- Answer-first rewrites of your key commercial pages
- Headings mapped to real question phrasings
- Tables, definition blocks and ordered steps where they aid extraction
- FAQ structures where the page genuinely is a set of questions
- Tracking of which answers you hold and which you lost
How we run it
The process
- 01
Find the questions
From search data, from your sales calls and from what assistants are asked. The phrasing matters: people type questions to assistants and fragments to search engines.
- 02
Answer early
The direct answer goes in the first paragraph under a heading that matches the question. Everything else expands on it.
- 03
Structure to be lifted
Comparisons as tables. Processes as numbered steps. Definitions as definitions. These survive summarisation; prose often does not.
- 04
Track and hold
Owning an answer is not permanent. We monitor the ones you hold and the ones you lose and treat losses as a signal about the content rather than noise.
Who this is not for
Not every page should become an FAQ and we will push back if the structure would damage a page that is converting well as it stands.
Questions
About this service
Rarely. Google substantially restricted FAQ rich results to a narrow set of authoritative sites. We still implement it where a page genuinely is a set of questions, because the structure is a clear signal of what the content contains but we will not restructure a page purely to deploy markup that is unlikely to display.
AEO is about being the extracted answer: one source, lifted largely verbatim. GEO is about being cited inside an answer a model composes from several sources. The writing discipline overlaps heavily; the corroboration work is more important for GEO. Our glossary covers this in full.
Sometimes and that is a real trade-off worth naming. In practice, being the named source on a question your buyer cares about tends to be worth more than a click from someone who would have bounced. For transactional queries we keep the conversion path above the fold.
Works with
Generative Engine Optimization
Structure your content so language models can quote it accurately.
Learn more AI visibilityAI Search Optimization
Get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews.
Learn more FoundationContent Marketing
Content written to be retrieved, quoted and acted on.
Learn more