Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making your content easy for answer-oriented surfaces to extract — featured-style summaries, concise claims, FAQ-shaped pages, and clear question/answer blocks. It is useful when buyers want a direct answer and systems reward pages that state who, what, and for whom without forcing a full site tour.
Whilst AEO is often treated as interchangeable with GEO, in practice AEO is the broader “be the answer” layer (snippets, extracts, FAQ patterns), and GEO is the narrower fight for generative citation and preference inside LLM answers. For example, a page wins a compact extract in classic search but never gets named in ChatGPT because entities and proof are weak. We often recommend AEO hygiene on answer pages first, then GEO measurement on a fixed prompt set across generative engines — not one label for both jobs.
AEO optimizes for systems that return an answer unit: a short passage, list, or FAQ extract a user can trust without clicking through ten blue links. That usually means one primary question per page, the answer near the top, supporting proof underneath, and stable URLs. It overlaps SEO (crawlability, relevance) and feeds GEO (citable passages), but success metrics differ — extractability and clarity versus answer share and named citations in generative replies. Avoid stuffing every page with fake FAQs; engines discount pages that look like keyword scaffolds. Use AEO where the buyer prompt is definitional or procedural; pair with entity consistency when the prompt is “who / which vendor / why you.”