A.E.O. (Answer Engine Optimization)
From an internet marketed to humans to one marketed to A.I.
Digital marketing is no longer being created solely to optimize for search engines like Google or Bing, but is now also being optimized for answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity. For years, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), the practice of strategically embedding specific key phrases, search terms, and schema into web content, has been as much an art form as a principal industry method for increasing businesses overall reach and profitability. However, with the increasing popularity of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT and Perplexity, businesses are beginning to find ways of increasing their chances of winning as the cited answer to AI user queries.
Online traffic and click-through rates have been key metrics of SEO success, measuring websites effectiveness at positioning themselves ahead in the search engine queue and their overall conversion rate of turning browsers into paying customers. However, LLM citations are beginning to throw those corner-stone indicators into obscurity. When users are cited anything from an LLM, not only do those citations not constitute a “click,” but also, since the trust of AI is so high among users, there isn’t as much convincing required, and more people who click through those links are ready-to-buy users. Meaning websites could see a decline in traffic and click-through rates, but an increase in sales — a situation entirely counter to the current schools of thought in marketing.
The difference between optimizing for search engines versus answer engines, however substantial in outcome, is subtle in practice. Josh Blyskal, the Lead of AEO Strategy & Research at Profound (the leading AEO insight platform) said in an episode of Content and Conversation that in Profound’s “king data set” of 117 million citations “listicals [and] comparative content are 32.9% of all citations… the number two is all blogs and opinion at 9.9%.” Keyword rich blog posts, press releases, headlines and subheaders, and schema metadata on content were all ways of addressing SEO. and, to a fair degree, are all of these are still viable for improving a website's chances of being cited. However, listicles, FAQs, TLDR sections, and content that is easily snippable for “crawlers” (programs used by AI to scrape data and surf the web) have become significantly more important due to their ease of citation.
In that same episode, Blyskal says how “semantic, long, descriptive url slugs win AI search,” along with emphasizing the impact including the current year in a url can have. When I asked ChatGPT on October 30th, 2025, to provide citations for “top ten best shoes” the first link it provided is a perfect example of the hyper descriptive url and easy to snip listicle crawlers are looking for:
https://www.vogue.com/article/6-sneaker-trends-to-look-out-for-in-2025?utm_source=chatgpt.com
“Third party validation is one of the key things that AI is looking for,” says Josh Bird, Director of Communications from the University of Alabama School of Law and previous Senior Account Executive of Method Communication; “You get those brand[s]... those publications that aren't behind paywalls, and then trade publications that are really specific to an industry, and the LLMs are going to pull from those to source their information.” Similarly, Sarah Kim, marketing specialist from Circle Global cites how “If your brand is looking to rank higher on an LLM… one of the best ways is to get a very authoritative entity to write about you. That, in conjunction with random people on Reddit talking about you, utilizing very specific phrases to describe you.”
AEO seems to be a step further into making the internet as we know it into the medium by which AI synthesizes and conveys recommendations, rather than the place where people get their information from directly. LLM.txt files, similar to CSV files but for AI, are a prospective solution to creating easily digestible webfiles accessible to crawlers without businesses needing to jeopardize the tone and content of their brand. However with the scarce adoption of such files, and AI integrated web browsers such as Google’s Gemini, and now ChatGPT Atlas, it seems as though LLMs are set to become the internet, what the internet was to books – reliant on their knowledge but a natural technological progression towards expediency and availability.
