Optimizing to be the source an AI answer engine cites when it summarizes the web for a query.
Answer engines — Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity — increasingly summarize the web and cite a handful of sources instead of just listing links. Being one of those cited sources is the new front page. AEO is the practice of earning those citations.
The lever is the same foundation that earns rankings: AI engines cite pages they can crawl, parse, and trust. A direct answer near the top, a clean heading structure, accurate structured data, and an llms.txt all improve your odds. A weak foundation gets skipped for a competitor the engine can actually read.
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