What is AEO and does my small team need it?

AEO is writing so that AI assistants quote you when someone asks a question you can answer. It is the same craft as SEO pointed at a different reader. And the honest answer for a small team is that it matters only once you have a handful of pages worth quoting, which is a higher bar than it sounds.

What is AEO, and what changed?

A search engine hands back a list and lets the reader choose. An assistant reads the sources and writes one answer. If you are not among the sources you are not in the answer, and there is no second page of results to be on.

This is measurable now rather than theoretical. Pew Research tracked 900 US adults through March 2025 and found 18 percent of all Google searches in the study produced an AI summary, reaching 58 percent of people at least once that month. So the unit of success shifts. It is no longer a position on a page, it is whether a sentence of yours ends up inside a response somebody reads.

What does AEO actually cost me?

Most writing about AEO skips this part. In the same Pew data, readers clicked a result in 8 percent of visits where a summary appeared against 15 percent where it did not, and clicked a link inside the summary in 1 percent of visits.

So winning at AEO does not replace the traffic that summaries take away. It is worth doing because being in the answer beats being absent from it, and because a reader who arrives after being told you are the source arrives already convinced. It is not worth doing because someone promised it would restore your click rate.

What does AEO change about a page?

Answer first. The question goes in the heading and the answer goes in the sentence directly under it, not in the conclusion. If a reader has to reach paragraph nine, a retrieval system will not.

One page, one question. A page that half covers five things gets quoted for none of them, because it never fully satisfies any of the smaller questions an assistant breaks a query into.

Plain headings phrased as questions, because that is closer to the form being matched against. And facts stated in full sentences: a number sitting in a chart cannot be quoted, the same number in a sentence can.

None of that is new writing. It is a rewrite of pages you already have, which is exactly why it appeals to a team of two.

Does a two person team need AEO?

Not on day one, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. If you have three pages, your constraint is that you have three pages, and no amount of formatting fixes that.

The scale of that constraint is easy to underestimate. Ahrefs studied roughly 14 billion pages and found 96.55 percent get zero traffic from Google, and named no search demand, no links and intent mismatch as the causes. Not one of those three is a formatting problem. Assistants draw from a narrower pool than search engines, so a page invisible to one is usually invisible to both.

It starts paying somewhere around the point where you have a set of pages that genuinely answer the questions your buyers ask. Before that, write more. After that, the formatting is the cheapest win available to you, because it is an edit rather than a new page.

What does the rewrite look like?

Concretely. A page currently headed "Our approach to onboarding" that opens with two paragraphs about your founding story is invisible to this. The heading matches no question, and the answer is buried below the part a retrieval system samples.

The same content headed "How long does onboarding take?" with a first line reading "Most teams are live in about two weeks, and the delay is almost always waiting on access rather than setup" is quotable. It answers in one sentence, states a figure in prose rather than in a graphic, and the heading is a sentence somebody types.

Nothing was researched or written to make that change. The founding story moved down the page. That is the whole edit, and it is representative of most of the work.

What is not optional?

Let the assistants read you. If your robots file blocks AI crawlers, nothing above this line happens, and most sites that block them did so by accident rather than by decision, usually by copying a robots file from somewhere else.

Open yours and look for disallow rules aimed at GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot from OpenAI, ClaudeBot from Anthropic, and PerplexityBot. Those govern whether those assistants can read you at all.

Worth correcting one thing you will see repeated everywhere, because it sends people after the wrong switch. Google-Extended is not the control for Google's AI answers. Google's own crawler documentation says it governs whether your content is used to train future Gemini models, and states plainly that it does not affect a site's inclusion in Google Search and is not a ranking signal. AI Overviews are built from the ordinary index, so blocking it does not remove you from them and allowing it does not put you in.

Be deliberate rather than merely permissive. There is a real argument for blocking crawlers that take your writing and send nothing back, and that is a decision you are entitled to make on your own terms. The mistake is making it by accident, from a robots file you copied, and then wondering why you are never cited.

How do I know it is working?

Ask the assistants the questions your buyers ask and write down whether you are named. Do it monthly, keep the same prompt list, and watch the count rather than any single answer, because answers move week to week and the trend does not.

Keep unbranded prompts separate from branded ones. Being named when someone asks about you by name proves nothing at all.

Common questions

Is AEO different from GEO?

They describe the same work under different labels. AEO is answer engine optimization, GEO is generative engine optimization, and both mean writing so AI systems can find, understand and quote you. The terminology is still settling, so treat any strong claim about the difference as marketing rather than method.

Do I need separate pages for AI and for Google?

No, and building them would be a mistake. The same page serves both, because the things that help an assistant quote you (a clear question, a direct answer near the top, facts in sentences) are the things that help a reader too. Pages built only for AI risk looking like doorway pages, which is a real penalty.

Does AEO work if my site has no backlinks?

It helps less than you would like. Assistants draw from a narrower pool than search engines and lean on sources that already have some authority, so formatting alone will not lift a site nobody links to. It is still worth doing, because it is an edit rather than a new page, but it is not a substitute for being worth citing.

Related reading

The practical version of the measurement above is here: Does ChatGPT mention my business?. On the file people keep recommending for this, see Do I need an llms.txt file?. And if you are still short of pages worth quoting, start at How many blog posts a month do I need?.

Sources

Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, July 2025. Browsing data from 900 US adults, March 2025.

Ahrefs, 96.55 percent of content gets no traffic from Google, December 2023.