AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the craft of structuring content so it gets picked up directly as the answer — by an AI assistant, by a Google featured snippet, or by a voice assistant. The starting observation: a growing share of searches no longer ends with a click to a website, but with an answer read as-is. If your content is the source of that answer, you exist in the conversation; if not, a competitor exists there instead of you.
How does it differ from GEO? The two terms overlap heavily, and the market sometimes uses them interchangeably. The useful nuance: AEO focuses on the format of the content — answering a precise question, in the first paragraph, in plain language — while GEO covers the whole AI visibility system, technical infrastructure and presence consistency included. In practice, AEO is a subset of GEO: content built to be quoted, inside a broader strategy.
What does AEO-optimised content look like? It asks the question the way users ask it ("how much does a restaurant website cost?"), answers it within the first two sentences with dated, verifiable facts, then elaborates. It prefers short lists, comparison tables and crisp definitions over sprawling paragraphs. It avoids vague marketing — "a leading provider of innovative solutions" is unquotable; "showcase websites from €69/month, domain and hosting included" is quotable. FAQs play a central role: every frequent customer question, asked and resolved on your site, is a chance to be the answer.
For a local business, AEO has one particular merit: it forces you to write what customers actually ask — hours, prices, lead times, specialities, conditions — rather than what you enjoy saying about yourself. The result: a site more useful to humans, and mechanically more quoted by machines. The pages of this site apply these principles, marked-up FAQs included; the blog shows a worked example with the restaurateur's guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT.
Common mistakes
- Burying the answer : a key fact (price, hours, a yes/no) hidden in the middle of a long paragraph won't be picked up. AEO needs a clear answer, up front.
- Answering the wrong questions : starting from your jargon instead of how customers really phrase things ("are you open on Sundays?") misses the target.
- Skipping the markup : a well-written FAQ without structured data (FAQPage) gives up a strong signal for featured snippets.