Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is an online marketing strategy that focuses on optimising content on a website to increase visibility in answer engines.
Answer engines can include AI (artificial intelligence) chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini, voice assistants and AI-powered search features like Google’s AI Overviews.
The purpose of AEO is to ensure content is being chosen and presented to users of these answer engines in response to their queries.
As a result, this helps increase visibility of the website away from more traditional search engines, such as Google or Bing.
Unlike traditional search engine optimisation (SEO), which focuses primarily on improving keyword rankings in organic search results, AEO involves optimising content so that it can be easily understood and interpreted by the AI used by answer engines.
When content is optimised to be machine-readable, it is much more likely to be featured by answer engines. This is because these AI-powered search systems need clear signals to help them understand what a page is about.
By using structured data, such as schema markup, this can make it easier for AI models to understand and extract information from your content, improving the chances of it being selected to appear in a featured snippet or AI Overview.
It is important to note that people typically interact with answer engines differently to how they do with traditional search engine, often using more natural and conversational language.
Users are more likely to phrase their queries as full sentences, rather than short keyword strings that they would use if typing the same question into Google.
For example, when speaking to a voice assistant like Alexa, a user might say “how do I make pancakes from scratch?” instead of typing “pancake recipe”.
By creating content that mirrors this natural, human-like phrasing, you make it easier for AI-powered search systems to interpret your content as a direct answer to a user’s search query, improving its changes of being selected and featured.
Need help optimising the content on your website for answer engines? Get in touch with the team at Engage Web today.
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