AEO guide
What is AEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is the process of making your content easier for AI systems and answer engines to understand, retrieve and use when responding to questions.
How AEO differs from traditional SEO
Traditional SEO focuses heavily on helping pages appear in search engine results. AEO also considers how content may be interpreted and surfaced inside AI-generated answers.
That means clear structure, direct answers, useful context and strong supporting information can all become important.
What does AEO involve?
- Answering common customer questions clearly.
- Using descriptive headings and structured content.
- Making important facts easy to identify.
- Building authority around relevant topics.
- Improving how content is discovered and understood.
Example dashboard
Illustrative AI visibility metrics
Why context matters
Visual website sections can sometimes contain figures, labels or interface examples that are designed to explain a concept rather than report real data.
When content like this is converted into a text-only format, providing additional context can help prevent illustrative information from being mistaken for factual claims.
Is AEO replacing SEO?
No. Search engines, websites and AI systems are closely connected. AEO is better viewed as an additional layer of content optimisation rather than a replacement for traditional SEO.
Well-structured content that is useful to people can also be easier for automated systems to interpret.