AI is changing how people are discovering, choosing and evaluating brands. Whilst Google still drives approximately 90% of all web traffic, online behaviours are beginning to fragment with internet users choosing AI large language model (LLM) search tools as ‘answer engines’.
The way people are looking for answers is changing. Users are no longer typing short keyword-driven queries and are instead asking full specific questions to their needs and engaging in conversations that demand context and clear answers. For example, if a user wants to search for a new laptop, they are changing their search from “best laptops” to “what’s the best laptop for someone starting Uni?”.
Online search no longer feels like a place to reach a destination and with AI chat, this becomes a continuous conversation. With nobody visiting your website directly, AI often sits between your customers and your content. But how can we stay ahead of this change? The solution is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO).
What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of optimising your website content so that answer engines, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, can easily extract, trust and present your content in answers, directly to users.
Because some users are no longer searching in the traditional way, traditional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) needs to be amplified with AEO. Where SEO focuses on ranking webpages, keywords, backlinks and getting users to click through to other website pages, AEO centres around structuring content to make it easy for AI to understand and providing the best possible answers so that this content will show up in AI answer engines.
This can feel strange because your content can now ‘win’ without being clicked on (which has long been a measure of success), attribution can feel inconsistent, and success can be harder for you to measure.
Why is Answer Engine Optimisation Important?
AEO is becoming more and more important because of the simple fact that search behaviour has shifted. Internet users are now asking direct questions and expecting instant answers. Because of this, some users are no longer accessing websites directly to find what they need, so visibility and trust now depend on whether your content is being shown (and whether it is accurate!) to users that are using AI answer engines.
As search continues to move towards an AI-first and zero-click experience, developing an AEO strategy increases the chance that answer engines select your content over that of your competitors.
How to Optimise Your Website for AI Search
AEO is all about ensuring that your website is complete, credible and structured in a way that AI can understand and share with its users. So, what can we do to make sure that our website is AI-friendly?
Develop Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content is the essential, defining pieces of your website that is typically longer, more detailed and offers insight that establishes you as a leader in your field. It should answer your audience’s most frequent questions and solve their biggest problems.
Stick to Human-Made Content
Original thinking, experience, opinions, in-depth answers to questions, and judgements written by humans all ranks better with AI answer engines. In contrast with this authentic human content, any content solely written by AI is devalued.
Refresh Content Regularly
Recent research shows that 95% of AI citations are from pages updated within the last 10 months. Make sure that your most popular and most important website pages are regularly updated, any key statistics are always correct, and news is up to date.
Consider Technical Improvements
Without a strong technical backbone, even the best pages risk being invisible to answer engines. Schema markup is a standardised code format that can be added to website HTML to help search engines and answer engines better understand, classify and contextualise page content.
Improve Social Listening
Social listening is critical because answer engines rely on aggregated consensus, not just brand-generated content. Social listening platforms, like Reddit, play a huge role in shaping this consensus because they showcase real customer questions, experiences and peer-validated answers.
Don’t Just Stick to Google
AI answer engines don’t just use Google for their data, in fact ChatGPT gets much of its sources from Bing. It is important to be verified on other search engines so that you do not become invisible to popular answer engines that your audience uses.
Final Thoughts
Search is now an ever-changing landscape thanks to AI answer engines and the speed in which they are developing. It can be tricky to get started but even taking that first step in optimising your website will help you to be more visible to your audience.
If you need any further support with your answer engine optimisation strategy, please feel free to reach out to Digital Pathfinders as we may be able to help you. You can get in touch via our website or by emailing us at: hello@digitalpathfinders.uk
