Also called: AEO
AEO is optimization aimed specifically at being the sourced answer to a direct question inside answer engines and AI Overviews — closely related to GEO, with an emphasis on question-shaped, extractable content.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that answer engines — AI assistants and AI Overviews — pick it as the sourced answer to a specific question. In practice AEO and GEO overlap heavily; AEO simply emphasizes the question-and-answer shape of content and the machine-extractability that lets an engine lift a clean, correct answer directly.
AEO-aligned content tends to state the answer plainly and early, uses clear headings that mirror real questions, and carries structured data that removes ambiguity about what the page asserts. The goal is not to trick an engine but to make the true answer trivially easy to extract and attribute.
As with all answer-engine work, the proof is in measurement: whether the engines actually begin sourcing your content for the questions you targeted, measured across enough samples to be trustworthy.