Skip to content
AI Search

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

Own the one answer. AEO structures your pages so featured snippets, People Also Ask, and voice assistants read your words back instead of a competitor's.

What is AEO?

Answer Engine Optimization is the work of winning the single response. Ask a phone when to replace a roof and it does not read out ten links. It reads one answer, from one source. AEO is how you become that source, on featured snippets, People Also Ask, the Bing answer box, and the assistants that speak results aloud.

Answer engines extract rather than compose. They lift a passage from a page that already states the answer plainly, which makes this structural work more than editorial work. Question-shaped headings. The answer in the first two sentences underneath. FAQPage and HowTo schema that marks which sentence answers which question. Tables and lists that still make sense once they are pulled out of the page. Entity signals so the engine knows which company it is describing.

The catch is that there is only one slot. Ranking third on a page of links still earns clicks; being the second-best answer earns nothing. That is why we report answer ownership as its own number rather than folding it into keyword rank.

AEO is the sibling of GEO, which covers engines that write a new answer and name their sources. Same goal, different mechanics: answer engines quote you, generative engines summarize you. Most clients run both.

What you get

Snippet & PAA Audit

Every question your market asks, and who owns the answer box for each one today.

FAQPage & HowTo Schema

The markup that tells an engine which sentence on the page answers which question.

Answer-First Rewrites

Headings turned into real questions, with the answer close enough to the top to be lifted cleanly.

Answer Ownership Tracking

A monthly count of the snippet and PAA slots you hold, and the ones a competitor took back.

Where to start

Answer ownership moves week to week, so this is measured work rather than a one-off fix. Begin with the audit, then decide how many questions are worth holding. Scope depends on that number, so pricing comes once the audit shows how many are winnable.

AI Search Readiness Audit

one-time

The way in. We work through the questions your market asks and show which answers you own, which you lost, and which nobody has claimed yet.

  • Answer box and PAA coverage map
  • Schema validation across key pages
  • Ranked list of winnable questions
Most Popular

Answer Engine Optimization

setup + retainer

Ongoing work to take answer slots and keep them: schema, rewrites, and a monthly pass as the engines change what they lift.

  • FAQPage, HowTo and entity schema
  • Answer-first content rewrites
  • Monthly answer ownership report

AEO + GEO Bundle

bundle

Add generative engines to the same programme. The question research carries over, so both surfaces together cost less than each on its own.

  • Answer slots and model citations together
  • One report across both surfaces
  • Bundled rate

Not sure which questions are worth chasing? We will pull your current answer coverage on a quick call.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is AEO different from traditional SEO?+
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten links. AEO competes for the box above that list, where one source gets quoted and everyone else gets nothing. The groundwork overlaps, but answer engines reward plain phrasing and explicit structure in a way that ranking alone does not, so we track and report the two separately.
Which surfaces does AEO actually cover?+
Featured snippets and People Also Ask on Google, the answer box on Bing, and the voice assistants that read a single result aloud. The test is simple: if a query returns one boxed or spoken answer instead of a page of links, that is an answer engine and it is in scope.
Do I need new content, or can you work with what I already have?+
Usually the page already exists and simply buries the answer four paragraphs down. Most early wins come from restructuring what you have, turning a heading into the question people actually type and putting a direct answer immediately beneath it. New content comes later, for questions you have never covered at all.
How long before an answer slot changes hands?+
Schema and structural changes are usually recrawled within a few weeks, and snippet ownership can flip in that window. Competitive questions take longer and can flip back, which is why the retainer includes a monthly pass rather than treating the work as finished.
How do you know whether it worked?+
We count the questions you own. Each month you get the list of snippets and People Also Ask slots you hold, the ones a competitor took back, and the ones still unclaimed. That is a countable number, reported apart from keyword rank so a ranking change cannot be mistaken for an answer-engine win.

Find out which answers you own

An AI Search Readiness Audit maps the questions your market asks to whoever currently owns the answer, and shows which ones you can take.