Guide
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
AEO is the work of getting your brand named and cited inside the answers AI assistants write. Not ranked near them — named in them. It covers what is on your own site and what other sites say about you. It can be measured, and we publish our own score as a worked example.
Updated 14 October 2026 · 6 minute read
Named, not ranked
When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “what’s the best accounting software for a small café?”, they do not get ten links. They get a paragraph naming two or three products, with a handful of sources underneath.
If your brand is not one of the few named, you were not shortlisted — and unlike a search results page, there is no second page to be on.
Answer engine optimization is the practice of making your brand easy for those assistants to find, trust and quote. It covers what is on your own pages, how that content is structured, and what the rest of the web says about you.
How AEO differs from SEO
They share plumbing but optimise for different outcomes. SEO earns a position in a list; AEO earns a sentence in an answer.
| Aspect | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page | Be named and cited in the answer |
| Unit of competition | A page against other pages | A brand against the other brands named |
| Measured by | Position, impressions, clicks | Mention rate, citation share, position among named brands |
| Where the traffic goes | Your site, if they click | Often nowhere — the answer is the destination |
| Timeframe | Weeks to months | Weeks, and it moves when models update |
The last row is the uncomfortable one. An AI answer can end the journey: the person gets what they needed without visiting anyone’s website. Your analytics will not show that as a lost visit, because it never was one. The only way to see it is to ask the engines directly and record what they say.
What actually moves an AEO score
Four things do most of the work, roughly in this order.
1. Answering the question in the words people ask it
Assistants quote pages that answer a question directly and early. A page titled “Solutions” that takes four paragraphs to say what it does will lose to a page titled with the question, answering it in the first sentence. This is why FAQ pages and plainly-titled guides punch above their weight.
2. Putting the specifics in plain text on your own domain
Prices inside an image, specifications in a PDF, integrations behind a JavaScript tab: an assistant cannot quote what it cannot read. If the fact is not on your page as text, the engine will take it from a review site or a competitor’s comparison page — and cite them instead of you.
The cheapest win in AEO: publish your monthly price as text. Most brands that lose the “how much does it cost” question lose it to a competitor whose pricing page states a number plainly.
3. Structured data that matches the content
Organization, Product, Offer, FAQPage and Review schema tell an engine what your page asserts, in a form it does not have to infer. Schema does not invent authority, but it removes ambiguity — and ambiguity is what gets you skipped.
4. Third-party sources the engines already trust
Assistants rarely cite only the vendor. They cite review platforms, directories, industry roundups and news. If your category’s answers keep citing one review site, an accurate, complete listing there is worth more than another page on your own blog.
How to measure it
AEO without measurement is decoration. Three numbers matter:
- Mention rate — the share of answers that name you at all.
- Citation share — the share of cited sources that point at your own domain.
- Position — where you appear among the brands named, because the first name carries most of the intent.
Measure them on a fixed set of questions, on a schedule. One spot check proves nothing: answers vary between runs, and a single lucky mention is not visibility.
What you want is the trend across months, against the same questions, with the competitors you actually lose deals to tracked alongside you.
A worked example: our own score
We ran our first check on Bungad the day this site launched, against eight questions a buyer would ask. We were named in zero of eight answers — a visibility score of 0 out of 100.
That is the honest starting point for a brand with a website a few hours old, and it is why we publish pages like this one.
The run also surfaced something no keyword tool would have. Perplexity cited 90 sources across those eight answers, drawn from 74 different domains in run A, of which 65 were cited exactly once. Run B, a minute later, gave 75 domains and 66.
The most-cited single domain accounted for five of the ninety. There is no small trusted club here; the engine reaches for whichever page most directly answers the question in front of it, which is both why we lost and why the loss is fixable.
A separate positioning note, which this run does not measure: in the Philippines, “AEO” means Authorized Economic Operator, a Bureau of Customs programme.
No Philippine question is in the eight, so we have no data of our own on it yet — but locally the phrase to use is “AI search visibility”, not “AEO”.
Where to start
- Write down the ten questions a buyer asks before choosing someone like you.
- Ask the engines those questions and record who gets named and cited.
- Fix the clearest gaps first: pricing in text, a direct answer page per lost question, schema that matches.
- Re-check monthly and watch the three numbers, not your feelings about the copy.
Common questions
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making a brand easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Copilot to find, trust and cite when they write an answer. Where SEO competes for a position in a list of links, AEO competes to be one of the few brands named inside the answer itself.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO optimises for ranking: the goal is a link high on a results page, measured by position and clicks. AEO optimises for citation: the goal is being named and linked inside a written answer, measured by how often you are mentioned and which source the engine credits. Good SEO helps, because engines draw on pages that rank, but ranking does not guarantee being named.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. Most AI assistants retrieve from the open web, so the pages that rank are the pages they read. AEO adds a second requirement on top of ranking: the content has to be quotable, the facts have to be on your own pages in plain text, and third-party sources the engines trust have to mention you.
How do you measure AEO?
Ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, on a schedule, and record three things: how often your brand is named, how often your own domain is the cited source, and where you appear among the brands named. Those three numbers, tracked monthly, are the measurement. A single spot check is not, because answers vary between runs.
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See where you stand
Enter your domain. We ask Perplexity three of the questions your buyers ask and show you whether you were named and which domains the engine cited.
3 questions on Perplexity, free. A domain checked in the last week is served from that stored run rather than asked again, and the daily free allowance resets at midnight UTC.
