What AEO actually asks of you (and why it's what good inbound always did)

I was sitting with a client a few weeks ago when he handed me a small test.

He pulled up an AI chat and told me to type the question one of his buyers might ask: “I’m looking for X consultants who work with Y product.”

ChatGPT didn’t bring up his company. Claude did.

He was a little disappointed to be missing from the first one. But that gap is part of why he brought me in, and it’s the clearest picture I’ve seen of what’s changing about how buyers find the companies they hire.

What is AEO?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It’s the work of getting your business named in the answers that AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews give when someone asks a question.

For years, SEO focused on ranking your page in a list of links. AEO focuses on getting your company named inside the answer itself. When a buyer asks an AI to recommend a company like yours, you either show up in that response or you don’t.

Why does this matter now?

Because buyers are changing where they start. A growing share of searches now end without a single click on a traditional result, as people read the AI summary and move on.

(Recent 2026 industry reports put zero-click searches near 69% and show organic click-through on AI Overview results dropping by more than half.)

Google still sends the large majority of web traffic, so this isn’t the end of the search you know. But there’s a new front door now, and a lot of businesses haven’t checked whether they’re visible through it.

How do AI tools decide who to mention?

They pull from sources they can read clearly and have reason to trust. In practice, that rewards a few things:

• Answering real buyer questions directly, in simple language.
• Structuring your pages cleanly enough for a machine to parse without guessing.
• Earning credibility from outside your own site: mentions, reviews, and references from places the AI already trusts.

It’s interesting, though, because this works in the same way that any person earns trust with another person. It happens over time.

What AEO actually asks of you

It asks for the same things good inbound has always asked for: clear answers to the questions your buyers actually type, content that proves you know your craft, and enough credibility that other sources point back to you.

The format is new, but the work underneath is the same inbound work we’ve always believed in. Earn trust by being genuinely useful, and be there when the buyer is ready.

How do I check where my business stands?

Open ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity, and type the question your best customer would ask. See whether you come up, whether a competitor does, or whether nobody in your space appears at all.

Run it in more than one tool. They don’t return the same answer, which is exactly what my client found when one named his company and the other didn’t.

A few quick questions

1. Is SEO dead? No. Google still drives most web traffic, and the fundamentals that help you rank also help you get cited. AEO builds on solid SEO rather than replacing it.

2. Do I need brand-new content? Maybe. Usually the fix is clarity. Most businesses already have the expertise, but typically you need to change the language to be easily understood by a buyer or AI.

3. How fast does this work? Slowly, then steadily. This is trust-building, not a switch you flip. If you knocked on the door of a customer that had never heard of you, you wouldn’t expect them to buy from you, especially if you didn’t have any proof that you could do what you do. Companies that start working on their AEO now will be the cited ones when more of their buyers make the shift.

Where we come in

Checking whether your business shows up when a buyer asks an AI is the kind of thing we dig into with the companies we partner with, alongside the rest of the marketing that earns the first conversation.

If you’re looking for a marketing partner who’ll treat that as part of the job, let’s talk.