Answer engine optimisation: what the term means, and which of your pages qualify
AEO is an industry coinage with no defining document, older than generative assistants. A prompt sorts your pages by which answer surfaces they serve.
- Works in
- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini
- You need
- The visible text of up to five pages, headings included · Five questions your buyers actually ask · One sentence on what you sell and to whom
- Written for
- what is answer engine optimization aeo
Scored by our own engine
This page, run through the audit we sell. Measured 4 August 2026.
Answer engine optimisation is an industry coinage, not a standard. No specification defines it and no body arbitrates it, and it was in use before generative assistants existed, when an answer engine meant a featured snippet or a smart speaker reading one result aloud. The prompt below skips the argument about the definition and sorts your real pages by which answer surfaces they can currently serve.
Where the term came from
AEO predates ChatGPT. It circulated among SEO practitioners in the era of featured snippets, People Also Ask and voice assistants, all surfaces that returned one answer rather than ten links.
The shared property of those surfaces is what the label was reaching for. A machine had to lift a self contained passage out of a page and present it alone. That is a structural demand on writing, and it is the same demand a generative assistant makes today, which is why the term outlived the technology it was coined for.
What it never acquired was a document. Generative engine optimisation has a named paper behind it. AEO has nothing equivalent. Nobody published it and nobody owns it, so two agencies can sell you opposite definitions with equal authority.
What the label describes, and what it does not
It describes a property of your page. It says nothing about how any system chooses between pages.
Eligibility is yours. Whether a passage under each heading answers a question on its own, whether a crawler can fetch the page, whether the answer arrives before the windup. All of it is editable this afternoon and measurable.
Selection is not yours and is not documented. Google states that no additional requirements or special optimisations exist for its AI features, and OpenAI documents its crawlers without documenting how anything is picked for citation. Anyone selling you a method for the second half is selling a guess with a price on it.
Why the prompt sorts rather than defines
Ask a model what AEO means and it returns a definition you already had. This prompt asks a different question of each page: which answer surface could it plausibly serve, what exact passage would be lifted, and what single edit changes the verdict.
It is required to produce a list of pages eligible for nothing, which is the section worth reading. A page that answers no question in a liftable form is not underperforming. It is absent.
Run the rewrites through the AI content readiness check, take the labels argument itself to AEO and GEO, which is which, and if you are weighing whether any of this deserves budget, start with the case for and against caring.
You are an answer extraction analyst. I am going to give you several of my
pages. Do not explain answer engine optimisation to me. Sort my pages by
whether they can currently be used as an answer, and tell me what to change.
First, one short paragraph, no more than 60 words, stating what you are
judging: whether a machine can lift a self contained passage out of each page.
Do not define AEO, do not call it a standard, and do not name a body that
governs it, because none exists.
Then, for each page I give you, produce a block in this order:
1. The page URL.
2. Which of these four answer surfaces the page could plausibly serve, each
marked eligible or not eligible with one clause of reasoning: a search
engine featured snippet, a People Also Ask entry, a spoken answer read
aloud by a voice assistant, a generated answer from an assistant that
fetched the page. A page can be eligible for none of them.
3. The single passage most likely to be lifted, quoted exactly from my text.
If no passage would survive being read on its own, write "none" rather than
choosing the least bad paragraph.
4. The one edit that changes the verdict, written as the actual replacement
text, under 60 words, direct answer in the first sentence.
Then three closing sections.
NOT IN THE GAME. The pages eligible for nothing at all, listed with one line
each on why. Be blunt. A page that answers no question in a liftable form is
not underperforming, it is absent, and I would rather know that than read a
score.
QUESTIONS WITH NO PAGE. Which of the buyer questions I gave you are answered
nowhere in what I pasted, and for each one, the passage that should exist.
WHAT THIS AUDIT CANNOT TELL ME. State plainly that eligibility is a property of
my page and selection is not, that no operator publishes how pages are chosen
for an answer, and name the specific things about my business that sit outside
the page entirely.
Constraints:
- Never say a page will appear in any answer surface. Eligible means capable,
not selected.
- Do not invent statistics, percentages or adoption figures anywhere.
- Do not claim any assistant reads any particular file unless I have pasted
operator documentation saying so.
- If a page is too short to judge, say so instead of producing an edit.
What I sell, and to whom: [ONE SENTENCE ON WHAT YOU SELL AND TO WHOM]
Five questions my buyers ask: [FIVE QUESTIONS, ONE PER LINE]
My pages: [PASTE THE VISIBLE TEXT OF UP TO FIVE PAGES, EACH UNDER ITS URL]What to change
Everything in square brackets is yours to replace. Nothing else needs editing.
[ONE SENTENCE ON WHAT YOU SELL AND TO WHOM]- Sets the bar for what counts as an answer. "We sell hand built kitchen cabinets to homeowners in Bristol" produces verdicts against the questions a homeowner asks. "We sell kitchen cabinets" produces verdicts against nobody, because the buyer is missing from the sentence.
[FIVE QUESTIONS, ONE PER LINE]- The questions as somebody types them, including the price question. "How much does a fitted kitchen cost in the UK" is a question. "Fitted kitchen cost" is a keyword, and a keyword produces an audit against a search box rather than against a passage somebody lifts.
[PASTE THE VISIBLE TEXT OF UP TO FIVE PAGES, EACH UNDER ITS URL]- Real page text with the heading structure intact, pasted rather than linked. Put each URL on its own line with the text below it. Five is the ceiling before most models start skipping pages quietly, and the giveaway is an output with fewer blocks than you pasted.
How to run it
- 01Pick five pages that are meant to earn something
Your service pages, your pricing page and your two best articles. Skip the homepage, which answers a question nobody asks, and skip anything you would not send a buyer to. The exercise is worthless on pages you do not care about.
- 02Write the five questions before you look at the pages
Writing them afterwards produces questions your pages already answer, which is a test you have rigged. Say them out loud as a stranger would, keep the awkward ones, and only then open the pages.
- 03Paste the text with the headings intact
Copy the visible text, not the URL. Some assistants cannot fetch your page, others fetch a rendered version a crawler never sees, and a page pasted as unbroken text loses the heading boundaries that decide where a passage starts and stops.
- 04Read the "not in the game" list first
It is the only section that tells you something you did not suspect. A page eligible for nothing has a structural problem, not a wording problem, and the fix is breaking it into sections with a real answer under each heading rather than editing sentences.
- 05Ship the replacement passages under the headings that ask the question
Put each rewrite as the first thing under its heading, not in an FAQ block at the bottom. The passage has to sit where the question is asked, because the heading is the boundary a model chunks on.
- 06Measure the page instead of trusting the verdict
Run the rewritten pages through the free AI content readiness check. It scores whether sections are bounded by headings, whether answers arrive in the first line and whether an author is named. A rewrite that does not move the score did not change the property the audit was judging.
Questions people ask
What is answer engine optimisation?
It is an industry term for writing and structuring a page so that a machine can lift a self contained answer out of it and present that answer on its own. It is not a standard, it has no specification and no body defines it. In practice it describes a property of a page rather than a method with agreed steps.
Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
It overlaps heavily and it is not identical. Classic SEO optimises for a page being ranked in a list of results, where the reader clicks through and reads the whole page. AEO optimises for a passage being extracted and shown without the page around it, which puts demands on structure and on where the answer sits that ranking alone never made.
When did people start saying answer engine optimisation?
It circulated among SEO practitioners well before generative assistants were widespread, in the period when featured snippets, People Also Ask and voice assistants were the surfaces returning one answer instead of ten links. There is no documented first use and no origin paper, which is part of why the definition drifts.
Do Google or OpenAI publish answer engine optimisation guidance?
No. Google publishes a page on AI features stating that no additional requirements or special optimisations exist for AI Overviews and AI Mode. OpenAI publishes documentation on its crawlers and says nothing about how pages are chosen for citation. Neither uses the term or endorses a method.
What actually makes a page eligible to be used as an answer?
Four things you control. A crawler is allowed to fetch it. The content is present in the raw HTML rather than arriving after JavaScript runs. Sections are bounded by headings so there is a defined start and end to a passage. The first sentence under each heading answers the question the heading asks, without needing the paragraph above it.
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