What’s AEO
AEO is short for Answer Engine Optimization. What they call the future of SEO.
Some people call it GEO, LLM-SEO, AI SEO, or etc. I think at the end of the day they mean the same thing which is “Optimize AI Search”.
When Search Engines are platforms like Google and Bing, Answer Engines are platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, etc.
In a nutshell, AEO aims to increase the likelihood that your business shows up as the answer to user questions.
Why Does AEO Matter
There are many reasons why people say AEO matters for businesses, but I believe it comes down to 2 primary reasons:
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Shift in the ways customers look for a solution to their problem
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High conversion rate of the traffic from Answer Engines
The Shift
When was the last time you used ChatGPT (or whatever your favorite AI platform) to answer your question? Maybe yesterday, maybe today. For me, it was 5 minutes ago.
But we don’t even need to look at numbers to feel this shift. Just notice how you search for answers now compared to two years ago, or watch how your friends do it.
And we know the change is massive.
If your business is not showing up at the platform where customers are looking for solutions, they’re not even considering you as an option.
High Conversion Rate
According to Ethan Smith from Graphite, one of the leading AEO/SEO agencies, their client Webflow experienced a conversion rate 6 times higher for traffic from Answer Engines compared to that of Search Engines.
That’s a massive difference if you didn’t notice.
There’s no true way to know why the traffic from Answer Engines is much more qualified, but we can extrapolate. It’s likely because customers have already built up a lot of purchase intent and clarity from the conversation with AI.
They:
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Had multiple follow-up questions
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Refined constraints
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Compared options
They are so much more informed by the time they click through the link.
What’s Coming Next?
Yes, I have talked about how AEO is important but if we look at all the sources where customers come from, Answer Engine still comprises a really small portion of the pie.
For example, here is Webflow’s traffic overview. Gen AI comprises only 0.68%:
Part of the reason why it’s so tiny is because of the attribution problem.
Google Analytics is last attribution by default, meaning:
Google Analytics gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the last touchpoint the user interacted with before converting.
Even if a customer finds a business through the conversation with AI, they may still go to Google, search the business name, and then purchase from there, which ends up being attributed to organic search or direct.
So it’s possible that the share of traffic coming from answer engines is being underestimated.
Consider where we are: ChatGPT alone grew from 1 million to over 800 million weekly users in just three years. And analysts project that AI-driven search traffic will overtake traditional organic search entirely by 2028.
The businesses showing up in AI answers right now are building a compounding advantage. Every month you’re not optimizing for answer engines is a month your competitors are getting cited instead of you.
The window to get ahead of this is open. It won’t be forever.