Definition

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making a brand more likely to be named and cited inside AI-generated answers on surfaces such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity, rather than ranked in a list of links.

AEO differs from classic SEO in what it optimises for. A ranking is a position in a list; a citation is an inclusion decision made by a model synthesising several sources. A page can rank third and never be cited, or rank eleventh and be quoted in full.

Because AI answers are non-deterministic, AEO performance is measured as a rate across repeated samples, not as a position. The honest unit is "cited in 34% of twenty-five samples, ±17 points".

Nostimates measures aeo across twelve AI answer surfaces. Request access →

All terms

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)AI Overviews AI Mode Citation share n-sampling Query fan-out Grounding Share of voice (AI)Extraction success rate Surface Answer engine Citation Brand mention Mention rate Confidence interval Statistical significance Citation volatility Non-determinism Reproducibility Identity-free collection Personalisation Locale Residential proxy Bot detection Collection cost Credit Evidence retention Audit trail Parser version Canary prompt Data freshness Cadence Prompt set Head term Long-tail query Competitive set llms.txt robots.txt AI crawler Training crawler Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)Hallucination Answer box Featured snippet Zero-click search Entity Entity salience Knowledge graph Structured data JSON-LD schema.org FAQ schema Answer-first content Chunk Embedding Semantic search Prompt injection Market coverage Sentiment analysis Position tracking White-label data