Answer engine optimisation: become the quoted answer.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making content easy for search engines to extract and present as a direct answer. Targets include featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, voice assistant responses and Google AI Overviews, where the answer appears before or instead of a list of links.

AEO is a focused part of SEO. Traditional SEO aims to rank a page in the list of results, while AEO aims to have a specific passage chosen as the answer itself. It relies on the same foundations, but adds question research, answer-first writing and structured data.

AEO targets answers shown by search engines, such as featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants and Google AI Overviews. GEO, generative engine optimisation, targets citations and mentions inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot. The two overlap but use different signals and tracking.

Google AI Overviews draw on pages already indexed and ranking well, so strong SEO comes first. Clear answer-first sections, accurate structured data, visible authorship and up-to-date facts make a page easier to cite. No one can guarantee inclusion, because Google chooses sources per query.

FAQ schema still helps search engines and AI systems parse questions and answers, even though Google now shows FAQ rich results for only a small set of authoritative sites. The markup must match the visible content on the page, or it can be ignored.