AEO — answer engine optimization, also called AI engine optimization

In practice AEO work concentrates on four questions. Can the engines read you — crawler access, clean markup, structured data? Can they retrieve you — content organized around the questions people actually ask? Will they trust you — sourcing, authorship, and consistency an engine can verify? And will they cite you — the difference between informing an answer and being credited in one?

The acronym itself is unsettled: AEO standardly expands to answer engine optimization, but AI engine optimization is in genuine circulation for the same practice, and both expansions describe the same work. The discipline keeps renaming itself — SEO begat AEO, GEO, and LLMEO, and the terms are used near-interchangeably, each emphasizing a different corner of the same shift. This publication's name, Anything Engine Optimization, is a position on that churn: the surfaces multiply — search engines, answer engines, shopping engines, agents — and the category is whatever ships next.

Measurement is the discipline's current frontier: citation share is emerging as the visibility metric, and the engines themselves have begun shipping first-party AI-performance data.