AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)
Optimising content to be cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the discipline of structuring content so that answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Copilot) select and cite it when answering user questions. It is the successor to classic search engine optimisation in a world where a growing share of financial-advice research ends with an AI-generated answer rather than a ten-blue-links results page.
AEO overlaps with SEO but is not identical. Shared foundations include technical crawlability, schema markup, authoritative content and topical coverage. Divergence points include answer-centric formatting (TL;DR summaries, FAQ blocks, definitional intros), entity markup (Person, Organization, DefinedTerm schema), extractable facts and statistics, and visible author and review metadata that answer engines use to assess trust.
For UK regulated adviser firms, AEO matters because prospects now ask "which is the best pension advice firm in Bristol" directly to ChatGPT and Perplexity. The firms that appear as citations in those answers are those that have published structured, authoritative content on the relevant topics with clear author credentials, published dates, and machine-readable schema.
Practical AEO for adviser websites involves publishing a dedicated answer library (a /ask/ or /questions/ directory with one URL per prospect question), a glossary of industry terms, author pages with credentials and sameAs links to LinkedIn and FCA register entries, benchmark pages with structured data and statistics, and visible last-reviewed dates.
See also: E-E-A-T, DefinedTerm schema, FAQPage schema, generative engine optimisation.