A guaranteed citation
Chat answers and AI Overviews move. We measure a fixed prompt set. We do not sell a position in them.
Answer engine optimization
Be the source the answer cites.
AEO is how a brand becomes the passage an AI answer quotes — in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot — without walking away from search.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of making your brand the source that AI answers cite. It sits on top of search engine optimization. The pages still have to be indexed, specific, and credible. The new job is to make a section quotable, and to make the brand an entity those systems recognize.
| Compared on | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| Unit that wins | A URL in the results | A passage, plus a recognizable entity |
| What the buyer sees | A title, a snippet, a click | A short answer, sometimes with a link |
| What you control | Page, links, technical access | Those, and whether the claim is easy to lift and check |
| How it fails | Wrong URL, or no URL | You are absent, or a competitor is quoted |
| How we measure | Impressions, clicks, rankings | A fixed prompt set: named, linked, or missing |
What tends to get cited
A direct answer
The first sentences resolve the question. Criteria, names, and limits beat a warm-up paragraph.
A stable entity
The brand, product, people, and places use one name across the site and the profiles around it.
Something original
A rubric, a dataset, a teardown, a price logic. Another summary of the top three articles is not a source.
Corroboration
A claim that also exists in a customer story, a filing, or a reputable mention is easier for an answer to repeat.
Machine-readable structure
Headings, tables, and honest schema. Markup does not rescue a page with nothing to say.
What we will not promise
Prompt hacks
Stuffing a page with instructions to a model is a short-lived tactic and a poor page for humans.
SEO, cancelled
If classic search is how your buyers compare you, dropping it makes the answer layer thinner, not stronger.
The field guide for the page itself is how to structure a page so an answer can cite it.
GEO covers generative chat. AIO is the Google overview. Citation building is how a source an answer already trusts comes to mention you.
AEO questions
Next
Find out who the answers name today.
The audit includes a prompt set for your category. You see whether you are cited, who is cited instead, and which page should have been the source.
A named result is published when that client clears the figure. ShoutRank does not guarantee a ranking or a citation.