If you've noticed a growing share of Google searches now return an AI-generated summary before a single traditional link, you're not imagining it. That summary box, and the equivalent answers inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Apple Intelligence, is the new front door to your business. Getting cited inside it is a different discipline to traditional SEO, and it's called Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO.
What AEO actually means
Traditional SEO optimises a page to rank in a list of links. AEO optimises content to be extracted, summarised, and cited as the answer itself. The searcher may never click through to your site, but if an AI tool names your brand as the source, that's a trust signal worth more than a rank-three listing most people scroll past anyway.
The two disciplines aren't in conflict. Everything that makes a page good for AEO, clear structure, direct answers, credible sourcing, also tends to help traditional rankings. But AEO adds a few requirements that classic SEO doesn't emphasise as strongly.
What AI systems are actually looking for
Direct, extractable answers
AI summarisation tools favour content that states a clear answer early, in plain language, rather than building up to a conclusion after several paragraphs of preamble. If a human would have to read your whole article to find the answer, an AI system probably will too, and it may just move on to a competitor's page that answers faster.
Structured data
Schema.org markup (the JSON-LD you might have heard mentioned) doesn't just help search engines understand your page, it gives AI systems a machine-readable map of exactly what your content is, who wrote it, and how it's organised. A page with proper Article, Organization, and FAQ schema is simply easier for an AI system to parse and trust than one without it.
Demonstrated expertise
AI answer engines are increasingly weighting source credibility, who's actually saying this, and do they have a track record on the topic. A generic, unattributed blog post competes poorly against content clearly published by a business with relevant, verifiable expertise in the space.
A practical starting point
You don't need to rebuild your entire site to start improving your AEO position. A reasonable starting sequence looks like this:
- Add Organization and Article structured data to your key pages
- Rewrite your most important page introductions to state the core answer in the first two sentences
- Check whether your site has a sitemap.xml and robots.txt at all, many don't, and both are basic prerequisites for any search or AI system to reliably discover your content
- Look at your FAQ or "About" content and make sure it directly answers the questions people are actually asking, not just what you want to say about yourself
Curious where your own site stands right now? Our AI Site Audit checks exactly this, structured data, AEO readiness, and the technical basics, and gives you a real, live-crawled read on your current position in under a minute.
