Answer engine optimisation (AEO) explained

Someone asks an AI tool for the best plumber, accountant or bakery near them, and gets a short answer with links. Your business is either in that answer or it isn't. That's the whole reason people are talking about answer engine optimisation (AEO), which you'll also see written as "answer engine optimization" in US spelling. Same thing, different spelling. This guide uses "optimisation" from here on, and it sticks to what Google and OpenAI have said in their own documentation, because there's a lot of noise out there and very little of it helps a small business.

AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. Its close cousin is GEO, generative engine optimisation. Both terms describe work aimed at being visible in AI search: the tools that answer a question directly rather than handing you ten blue links.

So is this a new discipline with its own rulebook? Fair question, and Google's answer is blunt. From its perspective, optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience. That makes it, in Google's view, still SEO.

That's worth sitting with. The label is new. The underlying job, making your site easy to find, understand and trust, is the one you were already doing. If a consultant tells you AEO needs a completely separate toolkit, ask which part of Google's own guidance says so. Google also points to its guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice.

Start with the dull news, which is also the good news: best practices for SEO remain relevant. Nothing you've done to keep your site healthy has been thrown out.

Here's why. Google's AI features rely on Search ranking and quality systems. They use retrieval-augmented generation, which in plain terms means the system looks things up before it writes an answer. They also use query fan-out, where one question gets split into several related searches behind the scenes. So the pages that feed an AI answer are pages that Search already found and rated.

That leads to a short list of requirements:

1. Your page must be indexed.
2. It must be eligible to show in Search with a snippet.

That's it. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. No special file, no secret tag. Nothing extra to install either.

And to be fair, there's a caveat, because there always is. Indexing and serving aren't guaranteed. Meeting the requirements gets you into the running; it doesn't promise you a place in any particular answer. Anyone who guarantees otherwise is selling something.

The practical first step is boring and useful. Check that your key pages can be indexed and shown with a snippet. Then move on to the part you can genuinely influence: what's on the page.

Google's guidance here comes down to one idea. Create valuable, non-commodity content with a unique point of view.

Commodity content is the stuff based on common knowledge. Google's example of commodity content is a list of "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers", which is based on common knowledge and could be produced by a generative AI model. A generic page explaining what a boiler service is would be the same kind of thing. Google's example of the alternative is a first-hand account of a specific experience.

Where does that come from? Google points to first-hand experience. You've fitted the boilers, filed the accounts, baked the loaves. You know which questions customers ask twice, which mistakes you see every month, which advice sounds right and isn't. Put that on the page. A short, specific answer from someone who has done the work beats a long, smooth answer from nobody.

Google also lists a few habits:

1. Organise pages with paragraphs, sections and headings that give a clear structure.
2. Add high-quality, relevant images and video where they help.
3. Write for your human audience and make the content well written and easy to follow.

None of that is exotic. It's just tidy.

One thing to avoid, and avoid firmly. Don't build a separate page for every slight variation of a query in an attempt to manipulate responses. Google says that violates its scaled content abuse policy. It's tempting, since it looks like coverage. Google also says a high quantity of pages doesn't make a website higher quality or more relevant, and that its systems can understand a page's relevance even without an exact match to the query.

If you serve customers in a particular area, there's a practical tool you probably already know. Google Business Profile helps local business details appear in AI responses. For sellers of products, Merchant Center does the equivalent job for product details.

So the advice is simple. Keep those listings accurate and complete. Check your opening hours, your services, your contact details. If your website says one thing and your profile says another, fix it. It's the least glamorous work in this whole guide and, for a local firm, among the most direct.

Here's where small business owners can save real time and money. A lot of advice out there is about extras that Google says you don't need. Going through them one at a time:

llms.txt files and other special markup. Google says these aren't needed for Google Search, and that Google ignores them. If you already have one for other services, it's fine to keep it. Just don't expect it to move anything in Google.

Chunking your content. Splitting pages into bite-sized pieces on the theory that AI prefers them isn't required.

Rewriting content just for AI systems. Not needed. Write for the person reading. Your existing, honest pages are the raw material.

Seeking inauthentic mentions. Google says this isn't helpful. Paying for or fishing for mentions that aren't real won't do you any favours.

Structured data. It isn't required for generative AI search, and there is no special schema.org markup for it. You may still have good reasons to use structured data elsewhere, but it isn't a gate to AI answers.

Third-party tools that claim to use internal Google metrics. Be wary. Google says no third-party tool has access to them. If a dashboard promises a view into how Google's AI scores your site, treat the claim with suspicion.

That's a fairly long list of things not to spend money on. Worth keeping handy next time someone sends you a proposal.

Google isn't the only place people ask questions. ChatGPT is another, and OpenAI has its own controls. It uses two robots.txt tags: OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot. Each setting is independent, so allowing one doesn't decide the other.

The one that matters for appearing in ChatGPT search answers is OAI-SearchBot. Sites that have opted out of it won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they can still appear as navigational links. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt. If you've never looked at your robots.txt file, now's a sensible time, because a rule added for an unrelated reason could be quietly shutting the door.

One detail to plan around. It can take about 24 hours for a robots.txt update to be picked up for search. So if you make a change and nothing happens straight away, that's expected, not broken.

We've written a fuller walkthrough in our guide on getting found by ChatGPT and AI search, which covers the practical steps in more detail.

There are two reasonable ways to look.

The first is Google's Search Console, which has a Generative AI performance report. If your site is already verified there, that's the place to start. Google describes it as a way to see how people discover your content through generative AI features on Google Search.

The second is a manual routine, and it costs nothing but a little time. Once a month, ask ten real customer questions in the AI tools. Use the kinds of questions your customers actually put to you, in their words rather than your industry's. Then note whether you appear.

Keep your expectations realistic about what you'll see. Results vary run to run. Ask the same question twice and you may get two different answers. So don't read too much into a single result; look for the pattern across the ten questions and across the months. Are you showing up more often? Are the answers describing you accurately? That's the useful signal.

Write the results down, even in a plain spreadsheet. Memory is a poor record.

If you'd like a starting point, Seracu offers a free snapshot: a free look at which topics your site lacks compared with its competitors. It doesn't promise rankings. It shows where the gaps are, so you can decide whether any are worth filling.

If not, the checklist above stands on its own: keep your pages indexed, your listings accurate, and your content worth quoting.