AEO glossary
Answer engine optimization
Also called AEO
AEO is the practice of making your content easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and cite when they write a response to a question.
AEO is industry jargon, not a standard. The term is used by SEO platforms such as Conductor, whose glossary frames the goal this way: "Unlike traditional SEO, which prioritizes ranking positions, AEO prioritizes becoming the cited source". In practice, the win you are chasing is a link next to an AI answer rather than a blue link on page one.
The engines themselves don't ask for anything exotic. Google says that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet", and that there are no special optimizations necessary. Perplexity says "Each answer includes numbered citations linking to the original sources".
So for you, AEO is mostly SEO with a different scoreboard: keep pages crawlable and indexed, write passages that answer a question in a sentence or two, and measure citations and mentions in AI answers, not only rankings and clicks.
Learn it properly
The course covers this in How answer engines choose sources. That lesson is free.
Related terms
Sources
- Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) | Glossary (opens in a new tab) · Conductor · Checked 28 Oct 2026
- AI features and your website (opens in a new tab) · Google Search Central · Updated 10 Dec 2025
- How does Perplexity work? (opens in a new tab) · Perplexity · Checked 28 Oct 2026