Generative Engine Optimization
The practice of improving how often and how accurately a brand's content is retrieved, cited and represented in AI-generated answers.
GEO AIAEO
Answer Engine Optimization
Optimising content to be the source of a direct answer in features and assistants that answer questions rather than list links.
In full
AEO predates generative AI — featured snippets, People Also Ask and voice assistants were answer engines already — and now covers AI Overviews, chat assistants and in-product copilots. The common requirement is extractability: a clear question-shaped heading, a direct answer stated compactly and unambiguously near it, and supporting detail below. The trade-off is that answering well can satisfy the user without a click, so AEO is worth most where a citation drives consideration rather than immediate traffic.
Example
A support page restructures each article to open with a two-sentence answer under a question heading, and starts appearing as the cited source in assistants.
Related terms
Featured snippet
A block at or near the top of Google's results that quotes an extracted answer from a page, with a link to the source.
Zero-click search
A search where the user's need is satisfied on the results page itself — by a snippet, knowledge panel, calculator or AI Overview — and no…
Answer engine
A system that responds to a question with a synthesised answer and citations rather than a ranked list of documents — for example…
Semantic chunking
Splitting documents along meaning boundaries — sections, topics, complete ideas — rather than at fixed character counts, to produce…