Intro to AEO
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the future of SEO. Learn why optimizing for AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity matters for your business.
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Mizuki NakanoRelated reading
Learn how AEO helps your Vancouver business get cited by AI search engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. A step-by-step framework for the zero-click future.
Learn how to implement Answer Engine Optimization in your business with this step-by-step guide covering platform strategy and running experiments.
Learn how to implement Answer Engine Optimization in your business with this step-by-step guide covering question research and tracking strategies.
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:
- Shift in the ways customers look for a solution to their problem
- 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.
There are many statistics telling "ChatGPT search has increased by X percent in 2025".
But we don't even need to look at those numbers, we can just feel the change in how people search for answers, just by looking at the way you search for answers or how your friends search for answers.
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:
- Had multiple follow-up questions
- Refined constraints
- 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.
Considering we're still only about three years into AI becoming mainstream, usage of answer engines will continue to grow regardless. As both adoption and trackability increase, so does the importance of AEO.