Glossary
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website’s content so that search features and AI assistants can lift it as a direct answer to a question, and name or link the source.
Also called AEO, answer engine SEO
Where the term comes from
An answer engine is any system that replies with an answer instead of a list of links: Google’s featured snippets and AI Overviews, voice assistants, and AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. AEO grew out of SEO as more searches end on that answer instead of a click.
Classic SEO asks “will this page rank?”. AEO asks a narrower question: “if someone asks this, is our page the clearest, most trustworthy answer to quote?”.
Why it matters for B2B websites
B2B buyers now research vendors by asking assistants things like “what does a SOC 2 page need?” or “which agencies build Webflow sites for AI companies?”. If your site never appears in those answers, you are left out of the shortlist before anyone visits.
Answers also shape how a category is explained. The company whose definition gets quoted often sets the terms buyers use when they compare vendors.
What AEO looks like on a page
- The question in the heading, and a one- or two-sentence answer directly under it
- Plain language, with the term defined before it is used
- Short sections with descriptive H2s, lists and tables that are easy to lift
- Structured data, such as FAQPage, BreadcrumbList and Organization, that matches the visible text
- HTML that crawlers can read without running JavaScript
- Clear authorship, dates and sources, so the answer can be trusted
Example
A page titled “Webflow vs Framer” that opens with three paragraphs of history is hard to quote. The same page opening with “Pick Webflow if your team runs a large CMS; pick Framer if designers want to publish without developers” gives an assistant a ready answer, with the detail below it.
How we handle it
On the sites we build, every key page starts with a short answer, headings follow the questions buyers ask, and schema is generated from the same data as the visible copy so the two never drift apart. Pages are served as plain HTML. Our AI search optimization service applies the same work to an existing site.
Last updated 15 November 2026
