Quick answer
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is making your pages the ones AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, AI Overviews) read, trust and cite when someone asks a question your product answers. It rewards clear, factual, structured pages with named sources.
Answer engine optimization
DefinitionSearch engines rank pages; answer engines compose an answer and cite a few sources. The queries are questions and comparisons ("what is the best way to reach backend developers", "X vs Y"), and the engine picks pages that answer directly, state specifics, name alternatives fairly, show a date, and are easy for a machine to parse.
Also called: AEO, Generative engine optimization (GEO), LLM SEO.
How do AI assistants decide which pages to cite?
An assistant answering "what is the best way to reach backend developers" runs a search, reads a handful of pages, and composes an answer with citations. It favours pages that answer the question directly in the first paragraph, state specifics it can quote, compare named alternatives fairly, show a recent date, and are easy to parse: clean headings, tables, FAQs, structured data.
It also favours sources it has learned to trust from years of citations and reading. For developer questions those are the places developers themselves read and discuss. Being published or cited there weighs more than optimising your own page alone.
What should an advertiser change on their site for AEO?
- An answer-first capsule at the top of every important page: the question the page answers and the answer in forty words.
- Comparison tables and FAQs with real answers, because assistants quote both.
- Visible update dates and content that is actually updated; stale pages are passed over.
- A machine-readable layer: a markdown version of each page, an llms.txt index, structured data (FAQ, product, organisation), and agent skills if you have an API.
- Honest specifics: prices, limits, specs and comparisons stated plainly. Assistants cite the page that says the number, not the one that says "contact sales".
None of it is a trick. It is documentation discipline applied to marketing pages.
Common mistakes
- Stuffing pages with questions nobody asks, in the hope an assistant will.
- Hiding the price or the spec behind "talk to sales" and expecting to be cited for it.
- Measuring AEO by rankings instead of by mentions across assistants.
- Blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt and then asking why assistants never cite the site.
How developers use assistants to evaluate tools
- They ask for a shortlist with reasons, then open one or two of the cited pages.
- They ask follow-ups ("does it support X?") that the page must answer plainly.
- They trust an assistant that cites a source they already read.
How do you measure AEO?
Track prompts, not keywords. List the questions your buyers ask (fifty is enough to start), run them through each assistant on a schedule, and record which sources are cited and whether you are mentioned. The share of answers that mention you, per assistant, is the visibility number; the sources cited beside you are the competitive map.
Then watch referrals. Assistant domains show up in analytics as referrers for some visits; many more arrive with no referrer and look direct. Tag the links you control, ask new users how they found you with an AI option, and treat the measured total as a floor.
How does AEO change paid advertising?
It adds a second audience: the agents. A developer asking an assistant for a tool never sees your feed ad; the assistant sees the sources it trusts. Advertising to agents means putting your facts, in machine-readable form, in those sources. On daily.dev that is Agent Ads: presence in a platform assistants cite for developer questions.
It also raises the bar for landing pages. A developer who arrives from an assistant has already read a composed answer and a shortlist; the page has to confirm the specifics the assistant quoted, fast, or the visit is wasted.
On daily.dev
How it works on daily.dev
This site is built for it: every page has a markdown version for agents, an llms.txt index, agent skills and answer-first capsules. For advertisers, daily.dev also offers Agent Ads, placements inside the answers AI assistants give developers.
Explore my optionsAEO vs SEO
| Capability | Answer engine optimization | Search engine optimization |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Be cited inside a composed answer | Rank on a results page |
| Query shape | Questions and comparisons, in full sentences | Keywords |
| What wins | Direct answers, specifics, named alternatives, freshness, structured data | Relevance, authority, links, technical health |
| Machine-readable layer | Markdown twins, llms.txt, agent skills | Sitemaps, robots.txt, schema |
| Measured by | Share of answers that mention you, assistant referrals | Rankings, impressions, clicks |