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 coherent…