Performance & Stack
AI Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Also called: AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, Generative Engine Optimization, GEO, LLM SEO
AI Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making a website's content reliably discoverable, citable, and quotable by AI search engines and chat assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Gemini. Where SEO optimises for a ranked list of links, AEO optimises for being the source an LLM repeats in a synthesised answer.
Classic SEO answers the question "who ranks first?". AEO answers a different one: "who gets quoted when no one clicks?". As AI search compresses the result page into a single answer, the only durable distribution channel is being the source the model cites.
The practical AEO surface for a B2B marketing site has five layers:
- Crawler access — explicit allowlist in `robots.txt` for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and similar agents, plus an `llms.txt` / `llms-full.txt` pair at the site root.
- Entity definition — every important concept on the site has a [DefinedTerm](/glossary) page with a tight 45–60 word definition and `sameAs` links to Wikipedia or Wikidata where one exists.
- Snippet-shaped content — every long-form page opens with a TL;DR and contains a FAQ block written as direct answers to People-Also-Ask phrasings.
- Schema — `Article`, `FAQPage`, `HowTo`, `Organization`, `Person` and `DefinedTerm` markup so machines can resolve the entities and claims.
- Off-site authority — being cited and quoted on third-party sources the LLMs already trust (G2, Reddit, industry publications, podcasts) so the model has corroborating signals.
AEO does not replace SEO; it inherits from it. Pages that earn classical authority are the same pages LLMs prefer to cite. The shift is in the *shape* of the content: tighter definitions, explicit claims, and structured proof.
Related terms
Single source of truth (marketing)
A single source of truth in marketing is the one system everyone on a team agrees to trust for what the strategy is, what campaigns are in flight, and what performance looks like. Without it, every weekly meeting starts with reconciling versions of the truth instead of deciding what to do next.
Marketing ROI dashboard
A marketing ROI dashboard is the single view a CEO, CMO, or CRO uses to see what marketing spend produced, in terms of pipeline and revenue, over a given period. For lean B2B teams, it is the artefact that ends the recurring debate about whether marketing is working.
Context-aware AI marketing platform
A context-aware AI marketing platform is software that captures a company's brand, strategy, and performance data as persistent context, then uses that context to plan, create, distribute, and measure marketing work — replacing the patchwork of separate planning, content, and analytics tools used by lean teams.