Your product isn't showing up in AI answers. That's an answer engine optimization problem

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website so AI answer engines, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, cite it as a source. Where SEO aims to rank your page in a list of links, AEO aims to get your content quoted in the answer itself. It relies on direct answers, defined entities, structured data, and content a model can read and trust.

They're close. AEO covers being cited across all answer engines, including Google's AI Overviews. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the slice aimed specifically at generative chat engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The tactics overlap heavily; the difference is which surfaces you're optimizing for. We run them as one program.

No. AEO and SEO work together. Answer engines still lean on classic ranking signals (links, site health, authority) to decide which sources to trust, so strong SEO feeds AEO. What changed is that ranking is no longer the finish line: buyers increasingly read the AI answer and never click, so you need to be in that answer, not just near it.

Give Google a page it can quote. Answer the question in the first sentence or two under a heading that matches the search, define the terms you use, and mark the page up with FAQ, product, and organization schema. AI Overviews pull mostly from pages that already rank on page one, so the classic SEO basics still decide whether you're in the pool at all.

Make your site easy for a model to read, trust, and credit. That means direct answers, well-defined entities (your product, category, and competitors), honest comparison pages, structured data, and proof with names and numbers attached. Then get mentioned on the sites the engines already cite for your category, like listicles, review sites, and industry roundups, because ChatGPT and Perplexity weigh what others say about you, not only what you say.

Answer engines read the web, decide which sources are trustworthy and relevant, and assemble an answer that cites a few of them. AEO works by making your pages easy for that process to use: lead with the direct answer, define your terms, mark up the page with structured data, cover the real questions buyers ask, and keep the technical foundations clean. Do that consistently and the engine starts reaching for you.

For a B2B or SaaS company, AEO means making your product the one an AI engine names when a buyer asks it to compare options, define a category, or recommend a tool. That's where a lot of B2B research now starts. It calls for direct product definitions, honest comparison content, and proof an engine can attribute to you, not just marketing copy.

If your buyers research in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI answers, yes, because that's where the decision now starts and a competitor is currently filling the gap. As of 2026, AEO difficulty is still low: the category is young, so the cost to become a cited source is far lower today than it will be once everyone is doing it. And because AI-referred visitors arrive further along, it pays to pair AEO with conversion rate optimization on the pages they land on.

We measure it by citations and mentions: whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews name you when buyers ask about your category, and whether that's trending up. We benchmark it before we start and track it month over month, so AEO becomes a reportable number, not a guess. Traditional SEO metrics (rankings, organic traffic) run alongside as the foundation.

Both, as connected services. This page is the AEO program. The classic search side, keyword strategy, technical SEO, and content, is our SaaS SEO work, and on Webflow sites our Webflow SEO team handles the platform side, including migrations that keep your rankings. They share a foundation: the same site health, structure, and authority signals that rank you in search also make answer engines trust you, so most clients run them together.