What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?

When someone wonders which accountant to choose, which plumbing company is the best in Bergen, or which SaaS solution fits their business, more and more people ask an AI model instead of googling it. They type the question into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and get a ready-made answer with a handful of recommendations. No ten blue links, no scrolling. Just an answer.

That answer often determines who gets considered, and who becomes invisible. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about influencing that answer.

What AEO actually means

AEO is the practice of structuring and presenting information about your business so that AI models can find it, understand it correctly, and cite it when someone asks a relevant question. The goal is no longer a position in the search results. The goal is to be mentioned in the answer itself.

That is an important difference. A Google ranking is a spot in a list the user still has to evaluate. A mention in an AI answer is often the entire basis for a decision, especially when the user never clicks through to check the sources.

Why this is happening now

AI assistants have gone from being a curiosity to becoming a first choice for research and recommendations, especially among younger users and in B2B purchasing. Many of these searches also happen without the business ever seeing them in Google Search Console, because the traffic never passes through a search field the business can measure. That makes it hard to know how visible you actually are, unless you ask the models directly.

AEO is not the same as SEO, but they are connected

Traditional SEO optimizes for a ranking algorithm and a click. AEO optimizes for a language model being able to extract, understand and accurately reproduce facts about you, often without the user clicking on anything at all. Much of good SEO work (clear structure, honest content, good metadata) also helps AEO. But AI models weight other things more heavily, including third-party mentions and how consistent the information about you is across the web. We go through the differences in more depth in GEO vs SEO.

What an AI model actually looks for

• Clear, fact-based content that directly answers concrete questions, not just marketing language.
• Structured data (schema.org) that makes it machine-readable what the business does, where you are located, and what you offer.
• Consistent information about name, address and services across your website, Google profile and industry directories.
• Reviews and recommendations from others, meaning someone other than you saying that you are good.
• Fresh content. Models that use real-time search (grounding) often weight up-to-date information more heavily.

Several AI companies have also started supporting llms.txt, a simple file that tells models which content on your website is worth reading.

How to get started

1. Find out where you stand today. Run a free check and see what the models answer now, before you change anything.
2. Clean up your facts. Make sure opening hours, prices, services and contact info are identical everywhere they are published.
3. Get real third-party mentions. Reviews, press coverage and industry listings count more than your own marketing copy.
4. Keep track over time. AI answers change as the models are updated and as competitors change their visibility, so a single measurement is just a snapshot. ModelSaid monitors this continuously and alerts you when the answer changes.

AEO is not about tricking an algorithm. It is about being the clearest, most credible answer out there, so that when an AI model is going to recommend someone in your industry, it is natural for it to mention you.