Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website's content and technical signals so that AI-powered answer engines — like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews — can accurately read, understand, and cite the business when a user asks a relevant question. It depends on crawlability, structured data, and clean, unambiguous content.
AEO extends traditional SEO from "rank in a list of links" to "be correctly described inside a generated answer." That requires a different set of preconditions: the AI crawler must be able to reach the page (crawlability and AI crawler access), the page's facts must be machine-verifiable (structured data), and the page's language must be clean and quotable enough that a model can lift a correct statement from it rather than having to infer or guess.
Revvye treats AEO as a bounded, honest signal rather than a guarantee. The product explicitly does not promise inclusion in any specific answer engine, because that outcome depends on the engine, the prompt, and the user's context — none of which a single website controls. What Revvye's AI-readiness dimension measures is the public-surface reason a business would be excluded from consideration in the first place: a blocked crawler, incomplete structured data, or a positioning page a visitor (or a model) can't actually reach.
This glossary itself is an AEO artifact: each entry's short definition is deliberately written as a clean, quotable, unambiguous answer, because that is the exact shape of content an answer engine is most likely to extract and cite when someone asks "what is a revenue leak" or "what does NAP consistency mean."
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