What is AEO? And Why Does It Matter?

AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude have made it so users don’t have to wade through search results to receive answers to their questions. They can simply enter a single prompt and receive an response with citations linking to multiple sources. The user doesn’t need to click through to a third-party page to get an answer.

These zero-click searches are so convenient that many end users are opting to use AI chatbots over traditional search engines. Brands that want to reach these users can do so by optimizing for AI search with AEO. AEO is essentially a set of practices that aim to structure and optimize web pages in a way that’s easy for chatbots to parse and cite. It’s also about building brand mentions to get a brand associated with a topic across multiple websites.

Companies that want to maximize their reach online must embrace AEO. “In a world of AI search, if you’re not LLM-friendly, you don’t make the short list,” Tim Sanders, chief innovation officer of G2, told me in a video call. Companies that don’t optimize their websites for AEO citations are losing out to those that do.

For instance, G2’s data shows 85% think more highly of vendors mentioned in AI answers, while 83% feel more confident in their final decision when using AI to make a purchasing decision.

“I’m not saying that you should stop buying Google Adwords, but you should definitely take some of that budget and move it over to AEO investments, whether it’s content investments on site, whether it’s trust signal investments off site, you should start peeling away money because the market split. You shouldn’t abandon Google, but you should definitely rethink the percentage you’re spending on that path,” Sanders said.

AEO Vs SEO In the Era of AI Search

As the adoption of AI search tools has increased, more companies are looking to feature as citations in the answers provided by these tools. However, there has been some debate about whether AEO is just another term for SEO. After all, both revolve around organizing content in a way that’s easy for third-party crawlers to analyze.

While the two can be mutually beneficial for expanding a company’s reach, SEO leans toward building structured long-form web pages optimized for particular keywords, whereas AEO is about providing simple and concise content that AI can easily process and summarize.

“Most of what gets sold as AEO is just SEO advice in a trench coat. When someone says ‘structure your content with clear headings and FAQs’, those are on-page tactics. If someone talks about ‘optimizing for entities by covering every subtopic in your niche,’ basically, that’s a 2018 pillar strategy. And making sure your site is crawlable and your server responds fast is technical SEO basics. I’d say a good way to tell is, if an AEO tip would’ve been good advice in 2019, then it’s just SEO,” Tim Soulo, CMO at SEO and AI visibility platform Ahrefs, told me via email.

Soulo suggests that the signals that drive AI visibility on AI search are different from traditional SEO. For instance, while Ahrefs found 76% of AI overviews' citations were pulled from the top 10 positions on Google, he notes that figure has since halved to 38%. This indicates that AI systems are ultimately looking beyond search rankings to decide what content to cite.

He says that AI search tools often look to pull from other data signals, including brand mentions across sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Reddit to guide citations. This suggests AEO isn’t just about on-page optimization, but also ensuring a brand is associated with a topic across multiple third-party sources.

Practical Tips For Implementing AEO

There are also a number of other ways for organizations to optimize a website for AEO. On the technical side, companies must first check for blocks on AI scrapers or crawlers as these also opt the website out of data processing and retrieval. Soulo also recommends avoiding JavaScript where possible to reduce the likelihood of AI crawlers being blocked from visiting a page.

It is also important to build content with AEO in mind. This can be done by front-loading citable statements at the top of the page, keeping pages updated and implementing Q&A formatting across content, posing questions followed by clear answers. The latter is something that G2 has been experimenting with on its category pages.

Sanders noted in our conversation that the company has managed to increase citations coming from Learning Hub, a resource where buyers can learn how to buy software, simply by inputting words verbatim from reviews into content. He claims this technique increased the section’s citations from 10% to 40%.