Guide · What AEO is
What is AEO? Answer engine optimisation, explained.
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of getting your brand named in the answers AI assistants write. In the US it is spelled optimization. Some people call it GEO instead. The assistants that matter are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. SEO gets a page ranked in a list of links. AEO gets a company into the one answer the buyer reads.
How an AI answer differs from a search result
A search result is a list. The buyer scans ten links, opens two or three, and decides. An AI answer is a paragraph with a shortlist in it. The buyer reads the names, sometimes asks a follow-up, and decides. There is no page two.
The shortlist is short. We ran 40 buyer questions on four engines for payroll and HRMS software in India. The average answer named 5.1 brands on ChatGPT and 4.7 on Perplexity. Gemini named 6.0 and Google AI Overviews named 7.4. A brand that is not one of those few names is not a runner-up. It is absent.
That is the whole reason AEO exists as separate work. Being on page one of Google is not the same as being in the answer. And the answer is where the search now stops.
AEO versus SEO
| SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are optimising for | A page's position in a list of links | A brand's presence in one written answer |
| Unit of success | Rank and click-through | Named or not, per question, per engine |
| Where the decision is made | Google's index and ranking systems | Whatever pages each engine retrieves and reads for that question |
| What moves it | Links, on-page relevance, technical health | How often the brand appears across the sources the engine reads, and whether those pages state facts it can quote |
| How you measure it | Rank tracking, Search Console | Run the buyer's questions, count who is named |
| What a page needs | To rank | To be readable by the crawler and quotable in one sentence |
The two overlap. Google's AI Overviews are built on Google's ordinary ranking, so a site that cannot rank will struggle there. But ranking is not enough on its own. In the payroll study, five companies sat on Google's first page for a buyer question. None of them was named in any answer to it.
How AI assistants decide which brands to name
The engines count. For a category question they read a set of pages and name the brands that keep coming up across them. The full mechanism, with the numbers behind it, is on its own page: how AI assistants choose the brands they name.
What AEO work involves
The work has six parts: crawler access, schema, entity facts, page briefs, the third-party record and measurement. What each part means, and how it is done, is set out on one page: AEO agency in India.
What AEO does not do
It does not buy placement. There is no ad slot inside a ChatGPT answer, and no engine sells one. The brands on the shortlist today are there because they show up again and again on the pages the engine reads. Every new mention makes the next one more likely. That is why the lead grows.
It does not guarantee an outcome. Answers vary between runs, engines change their sources, and the consumer apps add personalisation that no audit fully captures. What can be promised is measurement. The share of answers that name you, per engine, against a baseline, and the work that moves it.
Questions
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice yes. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) both describe getting a brand named and cited in AI-generated answers. Some people use GEO for the content side and AEO for the technical side. The engines do not care what it is called.
Do I still need SEO if I do AEO?
Yes. Google AI Overviews draw on Google's ordinary ranking, and most of the sources ChatGPT and Perplexity read are pages that rank somewhere. AEO sits on top of a site that can already be crawled and indexed. It does not replace that.
Which AI engines matter for an Indian brand?
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. OpenAI reported 100 million weekly ChatGPT users in India in February 2026, a figure it published itself. Which engine matters most depends on the kind of page that brand's category publishes. It differs brand by brand.
Can you pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
No. None of the engines sells placement inside an answer. Brands get named because they recur across the pages the engine reads for that question.
How long does AEO take to show results?
Technical fixes take effect as soon as the engines re-crawl, typically weeks. Presence on third-party sources builds more slowly and compounds. We do not promise a timeline; we re-run the questions and report what moved.