Glossary › AEO
AEO — answer engine optimization
AEO is the practice of getting a business’s facts into the answer a machine gives, rather than into a list of links a person clicks.
Search optimization assumed a human would see ten results and choose one. An answer engine returns one answer, assembled from whatever it could read at the moment it was asked. AEO is everything you do to make sure the facts in that answer are yours and are right.
In practice it splits into two jobs that get confused with each other. The first is reachability: can the machine fetch your page at all. The second is recoverability: once it has the page, can it actually find the answer to the question it was asked. Almost all published AEO advice is about the first job. Our measurements say the second one is where the failures live.
The uncomfortable part of AEO is that it is mostly not a marketing activity. It is editorial: deciding which questions you are willing to answer in public, in writing, with a date on them.
What we measured
Across sixty-four cold agent visits to twelve real company sites, 89% of visits could not state a price for what the business sells, and 57 of 64 read a single page and stopped (Note 27). That gap is the whole subject of AEO, stated as a number.
Source: MARKETING_NOTES_AGENT_VISIBILITY.md. Every note number is a dated measurement with its method and its cost.
disambiguation
What AEO is not
- It is not a ranking service. There is no published position to buy and no measurable ordering to game; anyone quoting you a rank inside an assistant is quoting a number nobody can audit.
- It is not a synonym for adding a fact sheet file. A file the agent never opens changes nothing — unpointed agents found ours 0 times in 18 visits (Note 15).
go deeper
The long version
A definition is the short answer. These go through the evidence:
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See what AI sees on your site
Vocabulary is cheap. The measurement is the part that tells you whether any of it applies to your site.
One model fetches your homepage and answers buyer questions from it. You get the recovery score and the specific answers it could not find. That is the whole free tier: it shows you the problem, and the fix package is not included.