From ten blue links to one answer
For 25 years, search meant a page of links, and SEO (search engine optimization — helping Google understand your site and show it near the top of those links) was how you competed for the click. Increasingly, people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews instead — and get a single written answer that names a few businesses or sources. If you're not named, you're invisible, no matter how high you'd show up in the old list of links.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — also called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — is the practice of making your business one of the sources an AI cites and recommends.
AEO doesn't replace SEO — it sits on top of it
Most of the foundations still matter: pages search engines can actually reach and read ("crawlable"), clear structure, trustworthy content, and a strong entity (a business the web clearly understands to be one real thing). What changes is the goal. Instead of only "rank and earn the click," you also want to "be the cited, recommended answer."
What an answer engine needs from you
- Clear, factual, well-structured content it can extract and quote
- A consistent, verifiable identity (name, location, what you do) across the web
- Signals of trust and expertise (real authorship, reviews, citations)
- Machine-readable data (called structured data, or "schema" — labels in your page's code that state your facts plainly) so nothing is left to guesswork
What you'll learn in this course
- How AI engines actually choose what to cite
- How to make it unmistakable who you are, using structured data
- How to write content AI is likely to quote
- How to measure and grow your AI visibility over time