What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?

Answer Engine Optimization is the older sibling of GEO and the discipline that featured-snippet optimization grew into. The target is being selected as the answer, not as one of several sources: the response read aloud by a voice assistant, displayed inside a featured snippet, or shown as the synthesized answer in an AI Overview. AEO rewards content that is structured to be lifted: a clear question as a heading, a clean two-to-three-sentence answer immediately below, schema markup that makes the structure machine-readable, factual specificity, and authoritative attribution within the text. The discipline is closely related to writing for the extract, which is the term we use internally for the same approach.