SEO Gets You Found, AEO Gets You Into the Answer
For years, businesses have optimized their websites around a relatively simple goal:
Show up when someone searches for something you sell.
That is SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
But increasingly, the customer is not simply searching through a page of links. They are asking an AI assistant questions like:
What would be a good ERP for a 100-person distributor?
Who can remodel my kitchen near me?
What is the best way to solve this inventory problem?
Which companies specialize in this type of problem?
The AI assistant may search multiple sources, compare options, summarize what it finds, and recommend businesses before the customer ever visits a company's website.
That creates another important discipline: AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization.
SEO vs. AEO
SEO asks:
Can a search engine find, understand, and rank my website?
AEO asks:
When an AI assistant tries to answer a customer's question, does it understand my business well enough to include me in the answer?
These are not competing strategies.
AEO builds on many of the same foundations as SEO.
Google explicitly states that its existing SEO best practices remain relevant for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode. There is no special AI markup or technical shortcut required to participate in these experiences.[1]
Microsoft has described a related discipline as Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, and is beginning to provide website owners with visibility into how often their content is cited in AI-generated answers.[2]
Whether you call it AEO or GEO, the shift is significant:
Your website is no longer just something customers read. It is becoming source material that AI assistants may use to understand and recommend your business.
What Should Businesses Do?
1. Keep doing SEO.
Technical SEO still matters.
Your website needs to be crawlable, indexable, well organized, fast, and built around useful content.
Search engines and AI assistants cannot effectively use information they cannot find.
2. Clearly explain what your business actually does.
Your website should explicitly describe:
Your products and services
The problems you solve
The industries you serve
The customers you work with
Your geographic reach
Your capabilities and areas of expertise
What makes you different
Do not make an AI assistant infer your business from vague statements such as "innovative solutions for tomorrow."
Tell it what you actually do.
3. Create content around customer questions.
Do not limit your content strategy to product and service pages.
Create useful information around the questions customers ask before they know which company they need.
That can include:
Common problems
Use cases
Comparisons
Buying questions
Alternatives
Costs
Limitations
Decision criteria
Frequently asked questions
This is particularly important because modern AI search systems can explore several related searches and sources while constructing a response.[1]
4. Make your expertise easy to understand and reference.
Use clear headings, direct explanations, examples, factual statements, comparisons, FAQs, tables, research, and supporting evidence.
Microsoft specifically recommends clear, structured, authoritative, current content when thinking about visibility in AI-generated answers.[2]
The goal is not to write robotic content for an AI.
The goal is to make your expertise unambiguous.
5. Structure your business information.
Structured data can help search engines better understand what information on a page represents.
For example, structured data can identify organizations, products, locations, people, events, articles, and other entities.
Google describes structured data as a way of providing explicit clues about the meaning of a page.[3]
That increasingly matters in a world where machines are attempting to understand relationships between businesses, services, products, people, and customer needs.
6. Make sure AI systems can access your content.
Businesses should also understand how their robots.txt rules and crawler policies affect AI discovery.
OpenAI, for example, identifies OAI-SearchBot as the crawler used to surface websites in ChatGPT search results. Publishers that want their sites discoverable through ChatGPT search should allow that crawler access.[4]
Blocking AI-related crawlers without understanding what they do could eventually become the equivalent of telling a search engine not to index your website.
7. Start measuring AI visibility.
Traditional SEO metrics still matter:
Search rankings
Organic traffic
Impressions
Click-through rates
Conversions
But businesses should begin adding another category:
AI visibility.
Consider monitoring:
Whether AI assistants mention your company
Which questions cause your company to appear
Which pages are being cited
How AI assistants describe your company
Which competitors appear when you do not
Referral traffic coming from AI platforms
Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has begun providing reporting around AI citations, including which pages are being referenced in AI-generated responses.[2]
OpenAI also adds referral information to links from ChatGPT so businesses can identify traffic coming from ChatGPT in their analytics platforms.[4]
The Bigger Question
SEO has traditionally been about convincing a search engine:
"My page is a good result for this search."
The emerging challenge is broader:
"Does an AI assistant understand enough about my company to know when my business is a good solution to someone's problem?"
Businesses should start testing that question today.
Ask ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, and other assistants the same questions your prospective customers would ask.
See what businesses they recommend.
See how they describe your competitors.
And then see whether your company appears at all.
If AI assistants cannot discover you, understand you, or confidently explain why your business is relevant, that is increasingly becoming a marketing problem — not just a technology problem.
If you are starting to think about how your business should be consumed by your customers through AI, there’s more than just AEO on the horizon.
Sources
[1] Google Search Central — AI features and your website
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
[2] Microsoft Bing Webmaster Blog — Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools
https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/February-2026/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview
[3] Google Search Central — Introduction to structured data markup
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data
[4] OpenAI Help Center — Publishers and Developers FAQ
https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12627856-publishers-and-developers-faq