What is AEO? A plain-English guide

AEO, or answer engine optimisation, is making your business easy for AI tools to find, understand and name when someone asks a question. That means ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, and similar tools. When a buyer asks an AI who to call, AEO is what helps you be in the answer.

You will also see it called GEO (generative engine optimisation). Nobody has an official standard for either name. The ideas behind them are the useful part, and that is what this guide covers.

AEO is not a separate website or a new kind of page. It is the same site, made easier to read for a person and for a machine: who you are, what you do, where you work and who you serve, stated plainly in text on the page rather than tucked inside an image or a menu.

SEO gets your pages found and ranked in search results. AEO gets your business included in the answer an AI writes. They overlap heavily: Google itself says that optimising for its generative AI features is "optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO". The difference is where you want to be named.

At Digital Monday we treat it as one job. Clean, fast, structured pages that say plainly who you are and what you do help both a search engine and an AI. SEO and AEO are part of the same plan.

AEO matters now because more people ask AI first, and AI answers change what people click. Pew Research found that in 2026 about 49% of US adults use AI chatbots, and 42% use them to search for information. In an earlier Pew study, people clicked a normal result in 8% of visits that showed an AI summary, against 15% without one.

• 49%

  of US adults use AI chatbots

  Pew Research Center, June 2026

• 42%

  use them to search for information

  Pew Research Center, June 2026

• 8% against 15%

  click-through, with an AI summary against without

  Pew Research Center, July 2025

• 68%

  of US Google searches ended without a click

  SparkToro, June 2026

• 7.3% to 1.6%

  position-one click rate on AI Overview queries

  Ahrefs, February 2026

Details the table leaves out. The Pew survey asked 5,119 adults in February 2026, and the click study watched 900 US adults in March 2025. SparkToro's figure covers January to April 2026 and comes from clickstream data. Ahrefs measured December 2023 to December 2025 across 300,000 keywords.

Two of those sources sell SEO software, and each study measures something slightly different, so read them as direction, not exact size. The direction is the same: more answers, fewer clicks, and being named in the answer matters more.

What works for AEO is the boring, solid work. Google says there are "no additional requirements" and no special optimisations for its AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that existing SEO fundamentals "continue to be worthwhile". These are the practices that have support, with the numbers behind two of them:

• 76%

  of cited pages already ranked in Google's top 10

  Ahrefs, July 2025

• 30 to 40%

  higher AI visibility from adding citations and statistics

  Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024

• Pages the tools can reach. Keep your site crawlable and your key content as text. OpenAI says its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, is what lets a site appear in ChatGPT's search answers, and recommends allowing it.
• Real, first-hand content. Google says original content with a unique point of view from first-hand experience is likely to matter more over time than any other tip.
• Clear, sourced claims. A 2024 research paper (KDD) found that adding citations, quotations and statistics to content raised visibility in AI answers by about 30 to 40% in a lab test, while keyword stuffing did little or nothing. It was a controlled test, not the live web, so treat it as promising, not proof.
• Ranking well to start with. Ahrefs found that 76% of the pages cited in 1.9 million AI Overview citations were already in Google's top 10 for the query.
• A fast, accurate, easy-to-read site. Pages that say plainly who you are, what you do and who you serve are easier for people and machines to use.

None of this is exotic. It is the work of good SEO done carefully: a fast site, plain pages that say who you are and what you do, claims a reader can check against a source, and nothing important hidden from the crawlers that read the page. The only new habit is to measure whether AI tools name you, and to treat that as a result worth tracking.

AEO folklore is the set of popular tips that have no evidence behind them. A fair rule: if a tip promises a trick for AI that Google, OpenAI or independent data does not support, wait for proof before you spend money on it. Here is where the evidence stands today, tactic by tactic:

On llms.txt, Google's John Mueller also said no AI system uses it, and the study behind the 300,000 domains was SE Ranking's. Both are in the sources column.

To check whether AI mentions your business, ask the tools the questions your buyers ask, repeat each several times, and note how often you appear rather than where. A SparkToro study of 2,961 runs found AI tools almost never give the same list twice, so a single result tells you little. Track frequency over weeks, and watch your enquiries.

Google's AI features also count in your Search Console reports under Web search, so your impressions and clicks from them are not hidden. If your enquiries are rising while clicks flatten, answers may be doing part of the work. Keep a simple log: the question asked, the tool, the date and whether your business was named, then compare month to month.

At Digital Monday, AEO is part of the work from $500 a month, together with your SEO. A small team and our engine do it for you, changes go live within 24 hours, and you can leave anytime and keep your website. Our guarantee: Results in 60 days, or your first two months back. No questions asked.

See how AEO works here, what SEO costs, or how AI changed SEO.