AEO
AEO (answer-engine optimization) is the practice of being named in AI-generated answers. It is measured at the answer level: mention, position, and citations.
AEO stands for answer-engine optimization: the practice of making sure AI answer engines describe and cite your brand when buyers ask about your category. It is the answer-engine-era counterpart to SEO.
AEO is not a single tactic. It combines clear, quotable pages, credible third-party sources, and structured data, then measures whether the generated answer improved. The measurement is the part most teams skip: without the verbatim answer, you cannot tell whether a change helped.
A practical AEO program saves the buyer prompts that create a shortlist, runs them across engines, records who was named instead, and tracks the cited pages. Fixing the source the engine leaned on is usually the highest-leverage move, then rerunning the same prompt to confirm the answer moved.
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