AEO vs SEO: How to Get Your Business Named in AI Answers

When someone asks an AI assistant which firm to hire, which hospital to visit or which product to buy, the answer often arrives as a short paragraph with a handful of names in it. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of making sure your business is one of those names, and that what the assistant says about you is correct. This post explains how AEO relates to SEO, what the evidence says, and the practical steps that work.

What is answer engine optimisation?

Answer engine optimisation is the practice of making your business easy for AI systems to find, understand and cite. The answer engines are ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and the AI features inside Google Search, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Researchers use a related term, generative engine optimisation (GEO). It was introduced in a 2023 paper from Princeton University and IIT Delhi, presented at KDD 2024, which showed that changes to how content is written can raise its visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al., 2024). AEO and GEO describe the same goal. This post uses AEO.

How is AEO different from SEO?

SEO and AEO answer different questions about the same content.

	SEO	AEO
Goal	A high position in search results	Inclusion and citation in AI answers
Where it shows	Lists of links on search pages	Paragraph answers in AI assistants and AI Overviews
What the user does	Scans results and clicks through	Reads the answer, often without clicking
Main signal	Relevance and authority of a page	Clarity, consistency and evidence across many sources
How it is measured	Rankings, clicks and organic traffic	How often AI names you, how accurately, and against whom

The overlap is large. Google's guidance for site owners says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search, and that no additional steps are needed to appear in them (Google Search Central). AEO builds on SEO: a site that search engines cannot read is one that AI systems cannot read either.

Why does AEO matter now?

People increasingly take the answer and leave. In a study of 900 US adults' browsing in March 2025, Pew Research Center found that users clicked a traditional search result on 8% of visits to pages with an AI summary, against 15% on pages without one. They clicked a link inside the summary itself on only 1% of visits, and 26% of visits to pages with a summary ended the browsing session there, against 16% without (Pew Research Center, 2025).

For a business, this changes what visibility means. If a buyer forms a shortlist from an AI answer and never visits your website, the AI's description of you is your first impression. Wrong pricing, an outdated service list or an unsupported claim repeated by an AI system costs you the enquiry before you know it existed.

How do you optimise for AI answers?

Six practices make the biggest difference. Most of them also improve SEO.

1. Answer the question in the first sentence

Start each section with a direct sentence that answers the question in its heading, then add detail. Keep each section self-contained, so that it still makes sense when an AI system lifts it out of the page. Headings phrased as the questions buyers actually ask help both people and machines find the answer.

2. Keep your facts consistent everywhere

AI systems cross-check what they read. When your website, directory listings, review sites and social profiles disagree about your services, prices, credentials or locations, the answer becomes vague or wrong. Use one name for each product and service, publish one source of truth for key facts, and correct contradictions on third-party sites.

3. Back claims with evidence others can verify

In the GEO research, adding citations, quotations and statistics to content were among the methods that most improved visibility in generative answers (Aggarwal et al., 2024). Dated results, named sources and first-hand experience give an AI system something it can repeat with confidence. Remove or substantiate claims such as "No. 1" or "assured results" that nothing on the web supports.

4. Make your site readable to AI crawlers

Check that your robots.txt and firewall do not block the crawlers that AI services use. Put key content in the page's HTML, where it is visible without running scripts. Publish structured data (schema.org markup for your organisation, services and frequently asked questions) and keep your sitemap's last-updated dates accurate.

5. Be present where AI systems read

AI answers draw on more than your own website: sector portals, directories, comparison and review sites, Wikipedia, YouTube and community forums. Accurate, current listings on the sources that matter in your sector are part of AEO, and they are often where the largest gaps sit.

6. Keep content current

Update figures, dates and examples when they change, and say when a page was last reviewed. Freshness helps only when the content itself is new: changing a date without changing the substance adds nothing.

How do you measure AEO?

Measure what AI systems actually say. A practical method has three parts:

1. Fix a question set. Choose 20 or so real buyer questions, phrased the way a prospect would ask them, that do not name you or a competitor. Any mention you earn is then genuine.
2. Ask every engine. Put the same questions to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, and record whether you are named, where, in what terms, and which competitors appear instead.
3. Repeat on a schedule. AI answers vary between runs, so treat each audit as a dated reading. Re-asking the same questions monthly or quarterly makes progress comparable over time.

Alongside traditional rankings and traffic, the measures that matter are brand visibility, share of voice against competitors, sentiment, the sources AI cites when it describes you, and the accuracy of what it says about your services, pricing and results.

Where should you start?

Start by finding out what AI says about you today. Run your buyer questions across the main engines, note where you are missing and where you are described wrongly, and rank the fixes by what blocks what. Technical fixes on your own site are usually quickest; accuracy on third-party sources takes longer and matters as much.

At DeployProAI we run this as an AI Answer Visibility Assessment: a structured audit across four AI engines, a gap report with a prioritised action plan, and guided remediation with your teams. We do not guarantee placement in AI answers; we measure, fix and track.

Sources

Source	Used for	Date
Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears	8% vs 15% clicks, 1% clicks in summaries, 26% vs 16% session ends	July 2025
Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024)	Up to 40% higher visibility; citations, quotations and statistics	2024
Google Search Central, AI features and your website	SEO best practices apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode	2025