What is AEO?
Also called answer engine optimization.
AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the work of making your content easy for AI assistants and answer features to find, understand and quote, so you appear in answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews.
AEO covers the same ground as good SEO with a different end point: instead of a ranked link, the goal is to be the source an assistant draws on and cites.
In practice it comes down to three things. The assistants' search crawlers have to be allowed to reach your pages. The content has to be readable without running JavaScript, since most AI crawlers don't execute it. And the page has to answer the question clearly, ideally in the first few sentences, so there is a passage worth quoting.
Google has said that normal SEO is what gets content into its AI features, and that special tricks such as AI-only rewrites aren't needed. Its spam policies now also cover attempts to manipulate AI answers.
Updated
Guides that cover this
Writing pages AI assistants can quote
2 min readPut a direct answer to the page's main question in the first few sentences, give each section a heading that says what it answers, and back claims with specifics you can stand behind. That's ordinary good writing, and it's what assistants quote.
AI crawlers list: every bot name for robots.txt
3 min readTo be cited in AI answers, allow the search crawlers: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), Claude-SearchBot (Claude), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Googlebot (AI Overviews and AI Mode). GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and CCBot are about model training, and blocking them doesn't remove you from AI search.