Inkless Agency
Ten years ago, one of the most valuable places your brand could be mentioned was in the Top 5 results on any Google search results page.
Being ranked well used to be nearly synonymous with success. Today, however, ranking well doesn’t guarantee clicks, and it certainly doesn’t guarantee leads or sales. Those hard-earned keyword rankings could be playing second fiddle to a new dominating force: AI results, whether they’re powered by AI Search Overview or a tool like ChatGPT.
You’re probably familiar with search engine optimization, or SEO. But what about optimizing content for AI-powered results? Is such a thing even possible? What is AEO, really, and how does it actually differ from the SEO we’re used to?
Below, we offer a brief explanation of AEO and how it’s changing search behavior – plus, what you need to know to start implementing AEO practices into your routine.
What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?
AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the practice of creating content that’s designed to be easily read and cited by answer engines. This is content that’s written, structured, and published in a manner that answer engines specifically look for or prefer.
In the world of content and marketing, AEO usually means adapting content to get a particular brand or product mentioned by an answer engine. But more generally, it can include any action you take to ensure your site is visible to AI tools, whether on-page in content or off-page through technical changes.
So, what is an AI engine, exactly?
Answer engines are, put simply, AI-powered systems that can synthesize written responses and deliver them to a user. Instead of providing a list of links to relevant content, as a search engine would, an answer engine seeks to actually directly answer the user’s question.
That means that AI engines will prioritize sources that do just that: directly answer a specific question.
You probably know plenty of AI engines already. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Claude are some of the most popular examples. If it exists, there’s probably an AI tool dedicated to it – but the good news is that all of these different tools use similar processes to choose which information to cite.
Here’s how they work:
The engine receives a query, often in the form of a question, from the user. For example, a user might type “what are the best marketing agencies in Boston?”
The engine analyzes a large volume of information – thousands or even tens of thousands of sources – in seconds.
The engine centralizes what it considers the most important information and synthesizes it into a concise, comprehensive response.
Your mission, when focused on AEO, is not only to make sure that your content is one of the pieces of information that gets analyzed, but also to be sure that it’s so useful in helping the answer engine generate its result that your content gets cited as a source.
In the case of our example (“what are the best marketing agencies in Boston?”), simply writing a listicle-style blog that lists your brand as the “best marketing agency in Boston” could be enough to get your brand mentioned by AI engines.
Because you were able to directly speak to the question that a user is asking, the AI engine can pull exactly what it needs right from your content.
AEO vs. SEO: Key Differences
Unlike SEO, which aims to create content that’s discoverable by search engines, like Google, AEO prioritizes practices that lead answer engines, like ChatGPT, to select and mention your website.
In either case, the goal is to get your brand mentioned, whether it’s at the top of a search engine results page (SERP) or cited in a response written by an AI tool.
With AEO tactics, you can increase the likelihood that your brand or content is selected and cited as the most authoritative answer to a user’s query.
The main difference between AEO and SEO, then, is the type of engine you want to perform well in – and therefore the techniques you’ll need to apply to your content.
What Does AEO Actually Look Like in Practice?
AI tools are designed on a question/answer model. Remember this: visibility in AI engine results depends on your ability to answer the questions your target audience is asking.
As such, there are two “pieces” to the AEO puzzle:
Knowing which questions your audience is asking, and
Answering those questions concisely in content somewhere on your site.
The first piece requires a bit of market research. A tool like Gumshoe.ai can help you identify what questions are being asked, which competitors are being mentioned, and which audiences want to know which details. With this information, you can begin to formulate a strategy for answering questions in your content.
Next, it’s time to zoom in on the second piece: answering your target audience's questions in a way that’s clear, concise, and likely to be cited by AI tools.
Long-form written content like blogs and guides is a great place to begin answering these questions, but you can also do so elsewhere on your site, like landing or service pages.
No matter where it lives, for the purposes of AEO, your content should be:
Structured for machine scanning and reading. This means intentionally designing your content’s structure with AI engines and how they operate in mind. What it actually looks like can vary depending on the content. It might mean including more quick, bulleted lists instead of long paragraphs of text, or using specific questions as subtopics instead of generic headers.
Written in language that reflects how people actually ask questions. As the name “answer engine” implies, AI tools are designed to answer a user’s question, and fast. It’s most interested in content that directly achieves that. In practice, this often looks like less rigid adherence to verbatim SEO keyword usage and more long-tail, specific queries.
Presented with clear authority signals. Your content must be trustworthy to be cited by AI. Different niches demand different signals – citing legislative code for legal content might be the standard, for example. How relevant your site is to the topic and whether you link to any external or internal pages are some basic signals an answer engine might look for.
Easy for answer engines to locate, understand, and attribute. Achieving this is a more long-term goal that involves several areas of your site beyond simple on-page content structure. Using appropriate schema markup, ensuring there are no technical issues preventing crawling, and updating old content with fresh citations are just a few examples of steps you can take to make your content easier for AI to read.
Think of AEO as an additional part of your SEO regimen. The steps you take to ensure your content is visible to search engines establish a solid foundation. The next move is to analyze your content with these pointers in mind and find opportunities to make the content more digestible to answer engines.
Why AEO Matters for Your Brand or Business
As generative AI tools like ChatGPT have risen in popularity, how users engage with content on the web has begun to change. This shift was dramatically expedited by Google’s implementation of AI Search Overview, which completely transformed SERPs as we know them.
Gone are the days of needing to rank as the #1 result to get your brand mentioned right at the top of a search engine results page – because of AI Search Overview, getting mentioned by Google’s AI engine could be more strategic than trying to get your page to organically climb the SERP through keywords, backlinks, and other traditional SEO markers.
AEO Responds to Changes in Search Behavior That SEO Can’t
As traditional page rankings become less visible or important to users, having your website mentioned by AI could be pivotal to your business’ growth.
This isn’t to say that SEO no longer matters, or is secondary to AEO. In fact, strong SEO acts as a sort of prerequisite to AEO. The same E-E-A-T framework that guides SEO strategy can serve as a foundation for an AEO approach. If the content at a URL is strong enough for Google to recognize it as credible, it likely has many of the markers that AI engines look for, too.
Practicing good SEO, particularly on-page SEO, helps you ensure that you’re well-positioned to achieve your AEO goals. Ultimately, both SEO and AEO play key roles in the sustainable growth of your business's visibility.
How to Improve AEO: Work with The Right Partner
When done well, SEO complements AEO, and vice versa. Today, SEO alone may not be enough to position your brand in front of the right people at the right time. An AEO-informed approach creates an ecosystem for your digital presence; in other words, you don’t have to rely entirely on organic traffic or keyword rankings to get more clicks.
Being mentioned by AI in the searches that matter, and then directing the traffic you receive from those mentions to the right place, is a new way to reach key audiences. And it’s one that could put you years ahead of your competitors.
At Inkless, we’ve seen firsthand how AEO shapes both search behavior and lead generation. With fewer people looking to traditional SERPs for answers, it’s more important than ever to be able to get into AI overviews and results.
But we’ve also seen that getting into those results still requires SEO knowledge and, most importantly, a commitment to high-quality, well-researched, and human-written content.
Staying on the cutting edge of AEO doesn’t mean abandoning everything we’ve come to know about SEO and online visibility. It just requires adapting our strategies and introducing some new techniques.
We’re pioneering a new age of digital content, one that’s informed by AEO but still prioritizes human-written content for humans, without cutting corners on credibility.
Ready to join us and see how we can help you implement an AEO strategy for your business? Book a call with our team today to start a conversation.
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