For 25 years, SEO has meant "rank my page on Google's results page." That's still real. But in 2026, more than half of all queries with commercial intent go through an AI assistant first — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity. The user reads the AI's answer and decides whether to click further.
If your brand isn't in the answer, you're not in the consideration set.
SEO optimizes for ranking on a list of links.
AEO optimizes for being quoted inside a synthesized answer.
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content so AI search engines retrieve, extract, and cite your brand when generating answers in your category.
Real. Sequoia Capital led a $58.5M round in Profound, the category leader, in 2025. Gartner named Otterly a Cool Vendor for AEO monitoring. SE Ranking, Ahrefs, HubSpot, and Frase have all shipped AEO modules in the last 12 months because their customers asked for them.
SEO answers: where do I rank for [keyword]?
AEO answers: when someone asks an AI a question in my category, does the AI mention my brand, and does it link my page as a source?
The two metrics are correlated but not identical. A page can rank #1 on Google AND be invisible inside ChatGPT's answer. We measure the gap so you can close it.
Three primary levers, in priority order:
LLMs preferentially extract Q&A-formatted answers because they're pre-chunked into the question/answer shape the model needs.
A page that links to .gov, .edu, and primary sources gets quoted more often than one linking only to its own marketing pages.
A new convention (like robots.txt) telling AI assistants which canonical URLs are authoritative. Perplexity and Claude already respect it.
Based on industry baselines, most content changes take 7–21 days to reflect in your AEO score across the LLMs we track. Schema markup adds usually show up within a week. llms.txt is faster — sometimes within 48 hours for Perplexity.
Technically yes — you can hand-prompt ChatGPT with industry queries and read whether your brand appears. But: (a) you'd need to do it for hundreds of prompts × multiple LLMs × every week to detect drift, (b) you can't measure citation graphs without a corpus larger than any single team can build, and (c) you can't prove changes worked without a baseline.
That's what we built. The free tier covers one domain forever, so you can verify the math before paying anything.