AEO (answer engine optimisation)
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the work of getting your page chosen as the one answer a search engine shows for a question, such as Google's answer box or a featured snippet. The word came before GEO. GEO covers the written answers of ChatGPT and the other AI platforms; most people now use the two words for the same work.
Example
A buyer asks "How much does teeth whitening cost in Dubai?". Google shows one short answer at the top, taken from one clinic's page. That clinic did AEO: a clear question as a heading, a two-sentence answer under it, a price with a date. The same page is the kind ChatGPT quotes when asked the same thing.
On 7 October 2026, on the "what is" and "how" questions in our 150-question scan, the five platforms named a tool on average in 0.1 to 0.6 of 5 answers and cited pages instead; the page that holds the answer is the page that is cited.
"What is AEO" is searched about 4,400 times a month in the US (DataForSEO, read 7 October 2026), nearly as often as "what is GEO".
How it is measured
For search engines: whether your page holds the answer box, and the clicks it gets. For AI platforms: whether your page is cited, and whether your business is named. See AI citation.