Glossary
AEO — answer engine optimization
AEO — answer engine optimization — is the practice of making content visible, retrievable, and citable inside answer engines: the systems that answer questions directly instead of returning links. It spans machine-readable structure, entity clarity, question-shaped content, and crawler access policy.
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 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.
The record: llms.txt
See also: GEOLLMEOSEOAnswer engineCitation share