What is AEO? Answer Engine Optimization Explained

If you’ve happened to take a quick scroll through LinkedIn or checked out a popular SEO site in recent months, you might have seen a disturbing rise in the frequency of typos. It seems nowadays, everyone is hitting the A key by mistake when they type SEO! 

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Well, if you’d slowed down that scrolling finger for a moment you’d know there’s no need for alarm - autocorrects around the world have not broken overnight. However, it sure feels like the search industry might nowadays!

So, what is this “AEO”, also known as Answer Engine Optimization?  How does it relate to SEO, and more importantly, the marketing of your business? How will this new term affect digital marketing as a whole? Are we looking at a new buzzword, or a job title we should all get used to hearing around the office? Read on to find out BAW Creative, the leading SEO agency in Manchester, has to say on the matter.

Answer Engine Optimization Explained

AEO is still somewhat new as a term, so its exact scope and meaning is still in flux (seriously, what even is an “answer engine”?) - but right now the term is starting to be used for those in digital marketing who are handling a brand/client’s visibility in AI-generated search results, such as Google’s AI Overviews and Perplexity. This task typically falls upon the resident SEO expert at a business, hence the similar naming.

What Does AEO Involve?

At the moment, that’s not exactly clear either, but what IS clear is that it’s something marketers and businesses alike need to figure out fast. When trying to make a brand appear in AI search results at the minute, best practice is loosely defined as the following:

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1. Solid SEO Foundation: Pages that rank well traditionally, tend to rank well in the new frontier as well. Aim for solid SEO first, and good AEO should be a natural consequence.

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2. Provide Genuine Value: No more keyword stuffing. If an AI is going to use your content in an answer, it needs to provide genuine value to a user. Your content has to be informative and something your site can speak with authority on.

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3. Be Easily Accessible: Exactly how “intelligent” the crawlers AI companies are using isn’t clear yet. Ensuring all content is indexed and easily accessible is key, and setting up an llms.txt will help massively.

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Does my Business Need AEO?

BAW Creative believes in providing genuine value to our clients, so in all honesty it’s hard to sell AEO as a must-have aspect to your marketing strategy going in to 2026. The concept is still new, and best practices are still being ironed out. With plans to introduce advertising into ChatGPT around the corner, the very nature of what it means to optimise your business for a so-called “Answer Engine” (better known as an AI) may change.

What is clear even now, however, is that if AI continues at the pace it currently is, your business will almost certainly need to care about AEO in the near future, and there’s no telling just how close it is. BAW Creative keeps up to date on the latest AI developments, and we’re keen to bring the advantages and visibility offered by this tech to our clients as soon as we can.

For now, the best thing to do is continue to enhance your SEO visibility, while keeping AI in your sights. Keep in mind when planning out your marketing strategy and site content that a focus on quality and accessibility over SEO viability now in the short-term, may pay massive dividends in the long-term.

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We hope this guide has given you a thorough understanding of this new and exciting term AEO, and that you can now scroll through the marketing corners of social media armed with the knowledge you need to get the likes you deserve. If managing AEO for your business sounds like a whole lot of hassle, trust the marketing experts here at BAW Creative to help lead the way into the AI-filled future. Contact us today for more information on how we can take your marketing to the next level.