What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) improves a brand’s visibility in AI-powered answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and Microsoft Copilot. Common optimizations for earning mentions and citations in these engines include content creation, schema markup, and backlinks.
Why is answer engine optimization important?
Answer engine optimization is important because search is changing. From AI platforms to AI assistants, users have options when it comes to researching problems, discovering brands, and purchasing products.
This shift emphasizes the need for search everywhere optimization, ensuring that content is accessible and relevant across various platforms.
How long does answer engine optimization take?
Answer engine optimization can take a few weeks to a few months to deliver results. Its performance depends on a website’s existing SEO, and from our experience, our AEO services help clients see those results faster by building on established best practices.
That’s because these sites have started the process of:
- Being discoverable to search and answer engine crawlers
- Producing relevant content for common topics within their industry
- Building an authoritative and relative backlink profile
- Claiming local listings and social media profiles
If search engine optimization is a new investment for your organization, consider focusing your resources there. Then, after mastering the basics, invest some resources into answer engine optimization.
How does answer engine optimization work?
How answer engine optimization works starts with how answer engines work.
Developing these AI-powered engines started with training them on various data sets (you can think of this as a search engine’s index). OpenAI, for example, used publicly available Internet data and private information from third-party partners to train its ChatGPT models.
As a part of their training, these models “predict the next most likely word that might appear in response to a user request, and each subsequent word after that.” As OpenAI explains, for the sentence “instead of turning left, she turned ___,” the AI might suggest “right,” “back,” or “around.”
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
There are a few differences between AEO and search engine optimization (SEO), including:
| Area | AEO | SEO |
| Platform | Answer engines, like ChatGPT, Perplexity AI, and Microsoft Copilot | Search engines, like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo |
| User targeting | Conversational questions, like “what are some good restaurants in Iceland?” | Keywords, ranging from a few to several words, like “best restaurants in iceland” |
| Metrics |
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