What is AEO, and does my site need it?
AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is setting up your site so AI tools like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, and Perplexity can understand and quote it. It matters because more people now ask an AI instead of scrolling search results.
In practice, AEO comes down to three things: clean page structure that a machine can parse, pages that answer specific questions directly and in plain language, and schema markup that describes your business as data rather than just words on a screen. The page you're reading is built exactly that way, which is why an AI can lift the answer above cleanly.
It overlaps with SEO but isn't the same. SEO gets you found in a list of results. AEO gets you named inside the answer, when someone asks an AI "who's a good Webflow designer?" or "how much should a website cost?", the goal is that your business is part of the reply.
Does your site need it? If your customers are the kind of people who increasingly ask an AI for recommendations, then yes. If your audience never touches those tools, it's less urgent, though the same clean structure helps your normal search rankings anyway, so it's rarely wasted.
See the whole Answers section →, it's the AEO approach in practice.