AI & AEO

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)

Quick Definition

AEO is the practice of optimizing content to be cited in AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and other generative search engines.

In context

AEO overlaps significantly with traditional SEO but emphasizes structured answers, clear factual content, schema markup, and entity establishment. Sites that rank well organically tend to also be cited by AI engines, but specific AEO tactics can improve citation likelihood.

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Related terms

Helpful Content System

Google's Helpful Content System is a sitewide quality evaluation that reduces the visibility of content created primarily for search engines rather than users.

Gemini (Google)

Gemini is Google's family of multimodal AI models, used to power Google's AI Overviews, Bard's successor chat surface, and the Gemini app and API.

Retrieval-Augmented Search

Retrieval-augmented search uses a search component to retrieve current relevant documents, which an LLM then uses to compose an answer with citations.

Bing Deep Search

Bing Deep Search is Microsoft's enhanced AI-powered search mode that uses GPT-4-class models to expand queries, fetch more sources, and synthesize longer answers than standard Bing.

AIO (AI Optimization)

AIO is an emerging umbrella term covering all forms of optimization for AI surfaces — AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini — across both retrieval and citation contexts.

AI Overviews Optimization

AI Overviews optimization tactics aim to be cited as a source in Google's AI-generated answer boxes.

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