What is AEO

Over the years many marketing fads have come and gone. For more than 25 years Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a great way to launch and grow a business online. The premise is simple: get your website into online search. Google Maps, Bing, Google Ads and other interfaces are all products of this tactic.

Today, the industry is changing quickly. A pole shift is happening. With the introduction of engines like ChatGPT has come new consumer behavior. If a user still searches Google, they are likely going to interact with an AI Overview and never actually even visit your website. Great for the user – horrible for marketers.

Enter AEO – a new discipline of optimizing how AI interfaces with your business. The primary components of AEO (AI Engine Optimization, also referred to as Answer Engine Optimization) are as follows:

1. Understand how AI perceives your website and organization. This involves installing tools that help you monitor, experiment with each engine, and likely hiring an expert.

2. Understand the data signals your organization sends to AI. This can include public posts about you your business, data cleanliness, user interaction on your website and more hidden signals.

3. Optimize to get better alignment, educate the AI or tune it much like you would train a Roomba to know the boundaries of your living room. From advertising to HR each area of an organization needs to have their data analyzed and improved, teams leveraged for their public footprint and all external signals cleaned up and organized.