What Is AEO? Rank in AI Search via Answer Engine Optimization

AEO allows you to tailor your web content to the AI answer engines your target audience relies on. Learn how to use answer engine optimization to drive traffic.

Greg Bernhardt is the senior SEO specialist at Shopify.

The launch of ChatGPT and other large language models brought a major shift in how consumers discover products. Today, generative AI tools are responsible for referring an estimated two billion site visits per month, creating a new challenge for marketers: How can your brand be included in an AI response? This is what answer engine optimization, or AEO, is all about.

In this article, I'll explain what AEO is and why it matters for brands today, as well as look at some top strategies for how to get your brand and content discovered by large language models (LLMs).

What is AEO?
Answer engine optimization (AEO), also called generative answer optimization (GAO), involves strategies to get content featured by new technologies that use generative AI as part of search engine retrieval. This includes AI answer engines like ChatGPT, as well as search engine features like Google's AI overview and hybrid search-answer platforms like Google's AI Mode.

With AEO, there are two different ways to show up in an answer:

The base generation coming from the training model (the answer itself)
The web search component that has become part of many AI-generated answers (the citation list)
Each requires different optimization techniques, which we'll cover in depth below.

Why AEO matters
Right now, AI search engines represent about 2% to 3% of search engine usage. That doesn't sound like much, but a couple of years ago, that number was zero. It's actually astronomical, considering Google had almost complete market share for 20 years.

When you factor in the AI features of traditional search engines, AI search may have captured 50% or more of search use. We don't know for sure, because Google and other search engines combine traffic data from both traditional and AI results.

Reference: https://www.shopify.com/blog/what-is-aeo