For years, search visibility largely meant appearing in a list of links. A customer typed a few keywords into Google, scanned the results and chose where to click.
AI search changes that experience. Someone can explain their full situation, ask for advice, compare several options and narrow down a shortlist without leaving the conversation.
Instead of searching for “email marketing platform,” they might ask:
What’s the best project management tool for a small team that needs something simple and affordable?
The answer may explain the category, recommend several products, compare their strengths and cite sources for further reading.
This is where answer engine optimization, or AEO, comes in.
What is AEO?
AEO is the work of improving how a brand, product or expertise appears in answers generated by platforms such as ChatGPT, Google’s AI search experiences and Microsoft Copilot.
That can mean helping your brand become:
Understood correctly
Included in relevant answers
Recommended for appropriate use cases
Compared accurately with alternatives
Cited as a useful source
AEO is sometimes discussed alongside GEO, or generative engine optimization. The language is still developing, but the marketing goal is similar: make it easier for AI-powered discovery tools to find, understand and use reliable information about your company.
How AEO relates to SEO
AEO and SEO overlap, but they are not the same thing.
Many AI search experiences use information retrieved from the public web, so useful, accessible website content remains important. But AEO looks beyond whether a page appears in search results. It also considers whether a brand is understood correctly, included in relevant answers, compared accurately and recommended for the right situations.
SEO is one part of that picture. AEO also involves brand positioning, content, PR, customer questions and the information other sources publish about your company.
What influences AEO visibility?
There is no guaranteed formula, but marketers can work on several important foundations.
Technical access: Important information needs to be publicly available and accessible to the search systems you want it to appear in.
Clear brand information: Your website and public profiles should explain what you do, who you serve, where you operate and what makes you different.
Useful content: Customers need clear answers to the questions they ask while understanding a problem, comparing solutions and making a decision.
Original knowledge: First-party data, expert experience, useful frameworks and detailed examples give your brand something valuable to contribute beyond generic information.
Third-party authority: Reviews, media coverage, directories, professional associations and other credible sources help form the wider public picture of your brand.
Accurate product and business information: Product feeds, business profiles and consistent service information can help platforms understand what is available and who it is relevant to.
This is why AEO cannot sit neatly inside one marketing channel. It connects SEO, content, brand, PR, product marketing and analytics.
How do you measure it?
AEO measurement is still developing, so start with a practical baseline rather than waiting for one perfect dashboard.
Track a fixed group of customer questions and record:
Whether your brand appears
How it is described
Which competitors are included
Whether the answer recommends, compares or simply mentions you
Which sources are cited
Whether AI platforms send referral traffic
Whether leads say AI influenced their discovery or decision
Run the same test regularly and look for patterns. One answer on one day is not enough to prove that your visibility has improved or disappeared.
Where should you begin?
Begin with the customer, not the technology.
Choose the questions someone might ask while discovering the problem, exploring possible solutions and deciding which provider to trust. See what the major AI platforms currently say. Then identify the clearest reason your brand is missing or misrepresented.
You may have a technical access problem. You may have weak content. Your positioning may be unclear. The information online may be inconsistent. Your expertise may not exist anywhere publicly.
The audit tells you where the real work should begin.
Try this prompt in a new temporary chat with web search enabled:
I want to run a basic AEO visibility audit for my brand.
Brand: [BRAND]
Website: [URL]
Category: [CATEGORY]
Audience: [AUDIENCE]
Location or market: [LOCATION]
First, identify five realistic questions a potential customer might ask an AI assistant while:
1. Understanding the problem
2. Exploring possible solutions
3. Comparing providers
4. Evaluating my category
5. Preparing to make a decision
Use current public web information to answer each question as neutrally as possible. Do not force my brand into the answer.
Then assess:
- Whether my brand appeared
- How accurately it was described
- Which competitors appeared
- Which sources were used
- Whether the apparent gap is related to technical access, brand clarity, content coverage, original expertise or third-party authority
Finish with the three most important areas I should investigate. Do not promise rankings or treat this one audit as conclusive.
AEO is not about finding a shortcut into ChatGPT. It is about making your company easier to find, understand and trust wherever customers now look for answers.
Happy prompting!
How to get ChatGPT to recommend your brand
Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini who to shortlist, and those answers name a small set of brands. This session shows how that shortlist gets built, where you sit against your competitors right now, and how you can make sure you're the top recommendation.
Omni Eclipse is hosting a free webinar on the 13th of August. Save your seat →