GEO & AI search glossary
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Optimizing a page to be the single extracted answer a search engine shows or reads aloud — featured snippets, People Also Ask entries, voice assistant replies. AEO is about owning the snippet; GEO is about being named inside a generated answer.
AEO assumes the user asked a question and expects one answer rather than ten links. The winning page is the one whose wording can be lifted intact: a direct question as the heading, a 40 to 60 word answer immediately under it, then the supporting detail.
The mechanics are concrete — question-shaped headings, self-contained answer passages, FAQ and QAPage structured data, a clean llms.txt file, and consistent facts about your business everywhere they appear. AEO is the foundation layer MyFast.ai puts in place before GEO work begins, because the same extractable structure that wins a featured snippet is what a generative engine quotes.
Related terms
- Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)The practice of shaping a brand's content and its footprint across the web so that generative AI assistants name and recommend that brand when they write an answer. Unlike SEO, the goal is not a ranked link — it is being the business the model mentions.
- Direct-answer blockA short, self-contained passage — typically 40 to 60 words — placed near the top of a page that answers the page's core question outright. It is the passage a generative engine is most likely to lift verbatim.
- Structured data (schema markup)Machine-readable JSON-LD embedded in a page that states what the page is about, who published it and how its entities relate. It does not force a citation, but it removes ambiguity about who you are.
- llms.txtA plain-text file at the root of a site that summarizes what the site is and points AI systems to its most important pages. This site publishes one at /llms.txt and a longer version at /llms-full.txt.
Want AI engines naming your business?
GEO by MyFast.ai does the work for you — GEO-optimized articles published to your own domain, forum swipe files, and monthly visibility scanning across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek and Meta AI. $1,499/month, no contract.