Answer Engine Optimisation is structuring your content so an answer engine, Google's featured snippets and AI Overviews, Perplexity, voice assistants like Siri and Alexa, extracts a direct answer from your page and presents it as the answer.
Across UC's 146-article Australian corpus audit, only 14% of sites used question-format H2 headings on more than half of their sections, and 0% carried a labelled Quick Answer block at the top, the two cheapest structural fixes for snippet eligibility.
AEO and SEO answer different questions. SEO asks "how do I rank in the list of links?" AEO asks "how do I become the answer that sits above the list, or replaces it?" An answer engine doesn't show ten options. It pulls one passage, names a source or two, and that passage is what most people read. So AEO optimises the shape of your content, not just its authority: a question phrased the way people ask it as the heading, the answer in the first one or two sentences underneath (self-contained, around 40 to 60 words), supporting detail after that, and structured data so the engine can tell what it's looking at. Google's documentation on featured snippets describes them as a single answer pulled from a page and shown above the regular results; in practice, tables, definition lists and step lists get extracted more cleanly than walls of prose.
Where it sits next to GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation is usually framed around generative chat answers from ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity; AEO around answer boxes and extracted snippets. The content changes are the same in practice, which is why we treat them as one job, AI Search Optimisation, rather than two separate ones. For the playbook side, see our plain-English AEO guide.
A concrete one. A builder's page titled "custom home builder vs project builder" that opens with the company's awards will never be the answer to "what's the difference between a custom builder and a project builder". Move the answer to the front, "A project builder builds from a fixed range of standard designs at a set price; a custom builder designs and prices each home from scratch to your block and brief", and the same page becomes eligible for the snippet and the AI Overview. We make that rewrite across a client's top pages as the first move in SEO & AI Visibility, because the content is already there, it's just in the wrong order, and it's the cheapest visibility gain available.
It doesn't replace ranking. The page still has to be crawlable and trusted on the topic. The GEO research makes the same point: structure helps you get picked, but only from the pool of pages the engine already considers credible.