Understanding it
The term spread with Google’s featured snippets (the boxed answer at the top of the results) and voice assistants, which read only one answer aloud. The arrival of AI answer engines gave it a second life.
In practice, AEO works on the question and its answer: a heading that repeats the question the way people ask it, a short answer right below it, then the details. It is the structure of a good FAQ, applied to the whole page.
AEO and GEO overlap a lot. People tend to say AEO for direct answers in general, and GEO for answers written by generative AI.
A concrete example
Illustrative example: a pricing page
A real estate agency often gets the same question: “what are the agency fees for a rental?” The answer exists, but it is buried in a long text about the agency’s services.
The page is reorganized: a subheading repeats the question, two sentences answer it with the legal framework and the agency’s fee schedule, then a table details each case. A visitor can read the answer in 10 seconds, and an engine can extract it easily.
The common mistake
Answering in one sentence and stopping there
A short answer is there to be reused, but a page that says nothing more has no reason to be cited over another. Answer first, then go deeper: conditions, exceptions, an example, a source.