Picture this, you’ve just got off the bus somewhere you’ve never been, you’ve a train to catch, and you’ve no idea where the station is. So you stop the first person you see and ask.
And they tell you.
“Right, so you go down past where the old cinema used to be, it’s a carpet shop now, well it was, then there’s that road where my cousin lived before she moved to Castleford, and you keep going a bit, not too far, and you’ll know it when you see it.”
Lovely person. Knows the town inside out. You’re still stood there no wiser.
So you ask someone else. “Second left, past the petrol station, big blue sign.”
Off you go.
Both of them knew the way, and the first one probably knew it better, but only one of them gave you something you could hold in your head and repeat to your mate on the phone.
That, in a nutshell, is how AEO works.
So what’s AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation and it’s the job of making your website the place AI tools pull their answers from, whether that’s Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or whichever one’s flavour of the month by the time you read this.
And the bit most people miss is this; when AI answers a question, it isn’t looking for the site that knows the most, it’s looking for the sentence it can lift and repeat.
The cousin in Castleford brigade doesn’t get picked β the big blue sign lot does.
How short is an AI answer?
Researchers have gone through these AI answers in their thousands, and one study put the typical one at just 67 words, others reckon it’s nearer 160.
Now think about how most business websites answer a question. Three paragraphs of “we pride ourselves on…” before they get anywhere near the point. It’s the old cinema directions all over again.
What does a repeatable answer look like?
Say someone asks how long an MOT takes; the answer isn’t 2,000 words on the history of vehicle testing in Britain, it’s one line, right near the top of the page.
“An MOT usually takes between 45 minutes and an hour.”
That’s the sentence AI can pick up and carry, then underneath it, you can delve in as deep as you like; what gets checked, what fails most often, whether you can wait with a brew while they do it. All of that still matters, because it’s what proves you know your stuff β it just can’t come first.
Answer first, detail second. It sounds daft and obvious, and yet most websites do it the other way round, even though funnily enough, it reads better for humans too.
So don’t just be right. Be repeatable.
But how do you know what people are asking?
This is where a lot of businesses come unstuck, as you can write the cleanest answer in Yorkshire, but if it’s an answer to a question nobody’s asking, it’s going nowhere.
The trick is to stop guessing and start listening. Do your research and find out what real questions people are typing in their own words. Google’s “People also ask” box is free goldmine, and so is your own inbox. If three customers have emailed you the same question this month, there’s your next page.
Then you go and answer them; one question, one clean line, then the detail.
It’s the difference between being the stranger who gets remembered and the one who gets a polite nod and a quick exit.
