What is AEO? How to get your business recommended by AI search
Updated October 24, 2026 · 2 min read · By the Next Aura Labs team, Peterborough
The short answer
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making your business easy for AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews — to find, understand, and recommend. Those systems build answers from sources they trust: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, reviews, and articles that mention you. AEO makes those sources clear, consistent, and quotable, with structured data, answer-first content, and accurate business details everywhere.
Why it matters now
A growing number of people skip the list of links and ask an AI assistant directly: 'Who's a good web designer in Peterborough?' or 'What should I look for in a physiotherapist near Lakefield?' The assistant returns one answer, often naming a handful of businesses.
If you're not in that answer, you aren't in the running — and unlike a page of search results, there's no page two to fall back on.
How answer engines decide who to mention
Different systems work differently, but the pattern is consistent: they retrieve information from the web and from business listings, then summarize what they find. They favour sources that are clear, specific, consistent, and corroborated by other sources.
- Clarity: does your website say plainly what you do, for whom, and where?
- Consistency: do your name, address, services, and phone number match across your site, Google, and directories?
- Corroboration: do reviews, local news, directories, and other sites mention you in the same terms?
- Extractability: can a system lift a clean, accurate sentence from your page to answer the question?
AEO vs SEO
They overlap heavily. A fast, well-structured website and a strong Google Business Profile help both. The difference is emphasis: SEO aims to rank a page; AEO aims to be quoted and recommended. That puts more weight on structured data, answer-first writing, and making sure your business is described the same way everywhere.
What you can do this month
Most of AEO is unglamorous housekeeping, which is exactly why so few businesses have done it yet. A few practical steps:
- Open each key page with one or two sentences that directly answer the question the page is about.
- Add an FAQ section that answers the real questions customers ask before buying.
- Add structured data (JSON-LD) describing your business, services, service area, and FAQs.
- Make your business details identical on your website, Google, Apple Maps, Bing, and directories.
- Ask happy customers for reviews that mention the specific service you provided.
- Ask a few AI assistants about your category and town, and note whether — and how — you're mentioned.
How we measure it
We keep a fixed list of the questions your buyers ask, run them through the major answer engines before any work begins, and re-run them afterwards. You see where you're mentioned, how you're described, and what changed. AI answers vary from run to run, so we look at patterns across repeated checks rather than a single screenshot.