AEO is the practice of earning a place in the direct answers produced by systems like Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and ChatGPT. It overlaps heavily with GEO but emphasises the citation: being the source the engine links to and trusts.
Practically, AEO means answering specific questions concisely near the top of a page, backing claims with verifiable facts, and using structure (headings, lists, schema) that lets an engine extract a clean answer it can attribute to you.
A page that opens with a direct, well-structured answer to "how much does an SEO audit cost?" gets pulled into an AI Overview with a link back — that is AEO working.
Why this matters for AI findability
Citations are how answer engines pass trust and traffic back to sources. AEO turns agentic findability into measurable visibility: appearing as the named, linked authority instead of an anonymous input.