Picture someone in Leeds who has just found a damp patch on their bedroom ceiling. They do not open Google and scroll through ten blue links. They open ChatGPT and type “who should I call about a leaking flat roof in Leeds, and roughly what will it cost?” A few seconds later they have an answer with two or three company names in it. If yours is not one of them, you never even made the shortlist.
That moment is what AEO is about. I get asked “what is AEO?” more and more by the owners I work with, usually right after an agency has quoted them for it. So here is the plain version: what the term actually means, where it came from, how an answer engine decides who to mention, and the handful of things worth doing first.
What is AEO?
AEO, short for answer engine optimisation, is the work of making your business the one an AI tool names or quotes when someone asks a question you should be the answer to. The answer engines are ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s own AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The key word is answer. A search engine hands you a list and lets you choose. An answer engine reads the list for you and hands back a finished reply, usually naming only a few sources. AEO is about being one of those few.
Where did the term AEO come from?
The term is older than ChatGPT. Jason Barnard, a French based search marketer, coined “answer engine optimisation” in 2018 and presented it at SEO Camp in Paris and at BrightonSEO that spring. Back then the answer engines were Google’s featured snippets, the People Also Ask boxes and voice assistants like Alexa reading out a single reply.
Then large language models arrived and the idea suddenly got a lot bigger. In November 2023 a group of researchers, including a team at Princeton, published a paper calling the same work “generative engine optimisation”, or GEO. Google launched AI Overviews in the UK in August 2024. The old AEO label stuck around because it describes the goal so plainly.
Is AEO different from SEO, GEO and LLM SEO?
AEO is different from SEO in what it aims for, and it is practically the same thing as GEO and LLM SEO. You will see all three labels on agency websites. Nobody should charge you more for picking a newer acronym.
The overlap with plain SEO is bigger than the sales pages admit. Google’s AI Overviews are built on its normal search index, and ChatGPT’s search leans heavily on Bing’s. A site that neither engine can find will not be quoted by either, however clever its AEO.
Why should a UK business owner care about AEO now?
Because a growing share of your customers now get an answer before they ever see your website. Ofcom’s Online Nation report for 2025 found that around 30 percent of UK searches now show an AI Overview, and 53 percent of UK adults say they often see AI summaries. UK visits to ChatGPT reached 1.8 billion between January and August 2025, up from 368 million a year earlier.
Clicks are thinning out as a result. Pew Research tracked 900 American adults and found they clicked a result on 8 percent of searches when an AI summary appeared, against 15 percent when it did not.
Here is the part that changes my advice, though. Seer Interactive found that brands cited inside an AI Overview earned 35 percent more organic clicks than brands that were left out. The traffic has not vanished. It has moved to whoever gets named.
How does an answer engine decide who to name?
An answer engine names the sources it can find, understand and trust for that exact question. It runs a search behind the scenes, reads the top results, then writes a reply from the pages that answer most clearly and from what other websites say about you.
That second part catches owners out. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best accountant for landlords in Manchester, it is not only reading accountants’ websites. It is reading Reddit threads, Trustpilot pages, Yell listings, local news stories and comparison articles. If none of those mention you, your own homepage is arguing your case alone.
For local questions, your Google Business Profile carries a lot of weight. Your category, your service area, your opening hours and the words people use in their reviews all feed into whether an AI describes you as a fit.
What does AEO look like for a small business in practice?
In practice, AEO means finding the questions your customers ask and making sure the web holds a clear, quotable answer that points to you. For most small firms I would work through it in this order.
- Build a question bank. Go through the last three months of enquiry emails, chat logs and notes from sales calls, and write down every question a customer asked before buying. Thirty real questions beat any keyword tool. If your inbox is huge, paste a batch into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to pull out the questions and group the duplicates.
- Answer each important question on your site. Give it a heading that matches how people phrase it, and answer it in the first two sentences. “How much does a flat roof repair cost in Leeds?” deserves a real price range, not “contact us for a quote”.
- Fix the Google Business Profile. Choose the most specific category, list every service, add photos, and ask happy customers for reviews that mention the job they had done.
- Get mentioned where the engines read. Claim your listings on the directories that matter in your trade (Checkatrade, Yell, Bark, Unbiased, whichever fits), make sure the details match everywhere, and answer questions honestly in forums and local groups where your customers already ask.
- Register with Bing Webmaster Tools. It is free and it feeds the index that ChatGPT search relies on. Since February 2026 it has also included an AI Performance report showing when Copilot cites your pages.
- Add structured data. Organization and LocalBusiness schema tell machines who you are and where you trade, so they do not have to guess.
None of these steps needs a developer. Most owners can do the first three in an afternoon.
Which AEO advice can you safely ignore?
You can ignore most of the technical tricks sold as AEO. Google’s guidance for its AI search features, updated in May 2026, says site owners do not need an llms.txt file or any special AI files. Google has said it will not use llms.txt, and no other major answer engine has confirmed relying on it either.
Be careful with robots.txt advice too. Blocking Google-Extended stops Gemini training on your content, but Google states it has no effect on your place in Search or AI Overviews. With OpenAI it cuts the other way: blocking GPTBot only stops training, while blocking OAI-SearchBot removes you from ChatGPT search answers entirely. I have seen a well meaning web developer block both and wonder why the enquiries from ChatGPT dried up.
Finally, skip the expensive tracking software on day one. Otterly.ai starts at $29 a month (roughly £22) and Semrush’s AI visibility toolkit sits nearer $99, which is fine once you are working on this properly. Before that, a spreadsheet does the job.
How do you know if your AEO is working?
You know AEO is working when the answer engines start naming you for questions from your question bank. Once a month, take ten of those questions and ask each one in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google. Note whether you appear, which competitors do, and which websites get cited as sources.
That last column is the useful one. If Google keeps citing the same trade directory, that is where your next listing should go. Pair the check with Google Analytics, where visits from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai appear as referral traffic, and you have a working picture without paying for anything.
Where I would start
If I were in your seat this week, I would build the question bank first. It costs nothing, and it quietly shows you what your website is missing. Most owners discover that half their customers’ questions are answered nowhere on their own site.
AEO is not magic and it is not a rebrand of SEO either. It is the slow, practical work of becoming the obvious answer, and a small local firm can genuinely beat a big brand at it. If you would rather have it done and measured every month, that is what my Search and AI Visibility service is for. You can read more about how I work, or get in touch and tell me which questions you want to be the answer to.