What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization, and how to measure it honestly
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of getting a company's pages found, read and cited by AI answers, such as Google's AI Overviews and ChatGPT search. Google says it's still SEO, because its AI features draw on the same Search index. The difference is in measurement. A citation in an answer has to be read separately from a ranking, because the two often disagree.
When TechFabric sets Heddle up on your site, every page gets a direct answer under its heading, a Markdown copy for assistants, and a citation reading kept apart from its ranking. How an engagement works.
Where the answers come from
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode answer from Google's own Search index. Its optimization guide says the features use the core ranking systems to retrieve pages, and that there are no extra technical requirements to appear in them. A page that isn't indexed can't be cited.
ChatGPT search runs its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI's documentation is blunt about it. A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt isn't shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a plain link.
What changes on the page
Less than the vendors selling AEO suggest. Google tells site owners to ignore chunking, rewriting for AI and special markup. What does help is structural and old-fashioned. Put a direct answer to the page's question in the first paragraph under the heading, in forty to eighty words a model can lift whole. Write questions the way people type them, and answer each in the first sentence.
Keep facts checkable. An answer engine that cites a page is quoting it, and a wrong price or a retired product name gets quoted too.
Measuring it
Read citations separately from positions. An answer can cite a page that ranks nowhere near the top, and skip one that ranks first. Heddle records both for each tracked term, with the date, and never adds them together.
Search Console now reports generative AI performance for Google's features. For ChatGPT, the honest method is still a dated, signed-out reading of the answer for each tracked question. Anything sold as a single AEO score is averaging things that move independently.
Sources
- developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
- developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports
Each was read on October 10, 2026.
Questions
Is AEO different from SEO?
Google says no. Its guide calls optimizing for generative AI search 'still SEO', because its AI features answer from the same Search index. The difference is in measurement, since citations in answers have to be read separately from rankings.
How do I get cited in ChatGPT search?
Be crawlable by OAI-SearchBot, since OpenAI says sites that block it aren't shown in ChatGPT search answers, and put a direct, checkable answer to the question in the first paragraph of the page that owns it.
Does structured data help AI Overviews?
Google says there's no special schema.org markup needed for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Structured data still helps ordinary results, and it gives entities stable ids that other systems can match.
Work with us
Let the agents bring you the leads.
Tell us about your business and who buys from you. On a short call we'll show you the searches your buyers make where you don't show up yet, and what the agents would do about them in their first month.
On the call, for your site
- The searches your buyers makeMeasured, with how many people make each one
- Where you show up, and where you don'tOn Google and in ChatGPT's answers
- The agents' first monthThe pages, fixes and links they would start with