Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of building the technical, structural and content signals that cause AI answer engines to select your brand as a cited source when buyers ask questions in your category.
How answer engines decide what to cite
AI answer engines do not rank pages the way Google's blue-link algorithm does. They parse structured data to understand what an entity is and what it does, verify that entity against corroborating mentions on third-party sources, retrieve the most direct and answer-shaped content for a given query, and attribute that content to the source they trust most.
AEO engineers all four of those signals simultaneously.
AEO versus SEO
SEO builds authority for a crawl-and-rank system. AEO builds authority for a retrieve-and-cite system. The underlying goal is the same: be the most visible option when a buyer is looking for what you offer. But the mechanisms are different enough that one cannot substitute for the other. A brand can rank on page one and be completely absent from AI answers. A brand cited by AI answers frequently may not be in the top ten organic results. The strongest position is both.
The AEO process at Online Optimization
We start with a citation audit: your brand and your three strongest competitors, run across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, to establish where you stand today. From that baseline we build your entity, restructure your content and begin the citation-earning process. Every month we run the same measurement so you can see the movement without depending on us to tell you it is going well.