People search “answer engine optimization” because they do not want another acronym slide. They want the job. The job is smaller than the slide.
Answer engine optimization is writing one public URL so an answer engine can lift a clean capsule from it. AEO is the acronym. Same craft.
What AEO means owns the letters and the customs collision. This page owns the expanded name.
The job, without the letters
An answer engine retrieves, synthesizes, and cites. It does not owe you ten blue links. If you want to be the source it names, the first HTML screen has to carry a sentence it can steal: checkable, dated if it moves, with a person or organisation attached.
That is this site’s page-level heuristic, not a documented rule shared by every answer product. Not a plugin. Not a generated FAQPage. Google ended FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026. Google Search ignores llms.txt. Forced chunking is not required. Do not rewrite the site “for AI.” Write a page a human can quote, then stop blocking the crawler that would fetch it.
How to get cited by ChatGPT is the week of work when the engine is ChatGPT Search. Use the first-screen check as an internal audit. Do not present it as a law of every pane.
What it is not
Not SEO. Rankings are a different artefact. AEO vs GEO vs SEO is the comparison.
Not GEO. GEO is the system around retrieve, interpret, extract, verify. Optimization of one URL is AEO. Mixing the words is how you buy a crawl report and call it a capsule.
The fail
Open the URL as HTML. If the stealable sentence is not there, you do not have answer engine optimization. You have a page with a blog about AEO in the sidebar.
Write the capsule. Put a name on it. Then measure whether the engine used that name, not whether a dashboard liked your schema.