Answer engine optimisation is about being the answer rather than a link to it. It predates the current wave of AI assistants, having grown out of featured snippets and voice search, and the techniques transferred almost intact. Our complete guide to AI search optimisation covers how it fits alongside GEO.
Why AEO became urgent
Zero click searches rose from roughly 56 per cent in 2024 to about 69 per cent in 2025. Most searches now end without anyone visiting a website. If your content is not being used as the answer, the search happened and you were not part of it.
The uncomfortable consequence is that success and traffic have partly decoupled. Brand visibility can rise while sessions fall, and conventional analytics shows you only the falling half.
Structuring content to be the answer
Use questions as headings where a question is genuinely what somebody would ask. Follow each one immediately with a direct answer in about forty to sixty words. Then explain.
Definitions deserve particular attention. A crisp self contained definition is among the most extractable structures that exists, and owning the definition of a term in your field means being cited every time somebody asks what it means.
Tables handle comparative questions in a form requiring almost no synthesis, and they survive extraction better than prose because the relationships sit in the structure rather than in sentence order.
Schema, and the line you must not cross
The useful types are FAQPage, HowTo, Article and Organization. They hand machines unambiguous facts rather than requiring inference.
One rule matters more than the rest. Only mark up content that is genuinely visible on the page. Emitting FAQPage schema for questions a visitor cannot see is structured data spam and a documented route to a manual action. Schema describes a page rather than supplementing it.
This is worth stating bluntly because it is the most common shortcut in the field, and the penalty is disproportionate to the gain.
Finding the questions worth answering
Google’s People Also Ask boxes, your own site search logs and your sales inbox are better sources than keyword tools, because they contain questions in the words people actually use.
Prioritise questions that sit immediately before a purchase decision. Answering “what is X” attracts researchers. Answering “how do I choose between X and Y” attracts buyers.
