🚀 SEO is yesterday's news – now it's all about AEO

We have been optimising for Google for years: keywords, metadata, Core Web Vitals. But what happens when no one searches anymore – but simply asks?

👉 Welcome to the age of answer engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity & Co. These systems don’t provide lists of links, but direct answers. Relevance is not determined by click rates, but by comprehensibility for AI systems.

🔍 SEO = Search Engine Optimisation

🧠 AEO = Answer Engine Optimisation

The difference? SEO optimises for algorithms with indexing and ranking.

AEO optimises for LLMs that understand – and reproduce – language, logic and context.

What AEO means today:

• ✅ Question-and-answer style content – ideal for prompt patterns
• ✅ Semantic depth – not just keywords, but conceptual relationships
• ✅ Structured content – clear sections, lists, formatting (Markdown, HTML5)
• ✅ Public visibility – GitHub, LinkedIn, blogs, documentation, wikis
• ✅ Technical authority – expertise confirmed by many sources
• ✅ Machine-readable + human-friendly – content for people AND models

A real-world example:

If you publish well-documented GitHub repos, clean docs or didactically strong how-tos, you’ll end up in the answers of LLMs more often – without ever ranking on Google. This is because LLMs draw on:

• publicly available content (Common Crawl, GitHub, arXiv, StackOverflow)
• embeddings-based similarity patterns
• and what has been identified as helpful and trustworthy during training

Conclusion

Anyone creating content today must ask themselves a new question:

Would an AI classify my answer as helpful – and pass it on?

If so, you’re in the game. If not, you’ll be standing in the shadow of other people’s prompt output. 📌 AEO is not an alternative to SEO – it’s the logical next step.

I call it: Content that thinks. And is understood.

💬 What do you think? Are you already using AEO techniques – or are you still optimising ‘for Google’? Here’s an article on Digital Bloom