What is AEO? The Developer's Guide to Answer Engine Optimization

Traditional SEO was built for a world where humans typed keywords into Google and scanned ten blue links. That world is disappearing. Today, AI-powered answer engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot — are synthesising direct answers from web content, often without the user ever clicking through. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your website's content and metadata so that AI models can accurately extract, attribute, and cite your pages w