What is AEO? A guide to Answer Engine Optimization

Where do answer engines show answers?

Direct answers appear in Google featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes, Bing answer cards, knowledge panels, voice assistants such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, and the AI answer panels of Google, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT and Perplexity.

How do I write content that answer engines can quote?

Use the answer-first pattern: put the question in a heading, answer it completely in one or two plain sentences directly underneath, then add detail, examples and evidence below.

1. Phrase the heading the way a person would ask it: “How long does a UK visit visa take?”
2. Answer in the first sentence. Repeat the key noun from the question so the answer stands alone out of context.
3. Keep that first answer to roughly 40–60 words — a common practitioner rule of thumb, not an official limit.
4. Follow with a list, table or steps for detail.
5. Cover one question per section so each answer can be extracted cleanly.

Which structured data helps with AEO?

FAQPage, QAPage, HowTo, Article, BreadcrumbList and Organization schema help machines understand questions, answers and who is giving them. Use schema only for content that is visible on the page.

Even where Google no longer shows a visual rich result, the same markup is still read by Bing and by AI systems that parse pages, and it costs nothing to keep accurate.

How do I find the questions people are asking?

Collect real questions from Google’s People Also Ask boxes, the query report in Search Console, “related searches”, your sales and support inbox, and forums where your customers talk.

• Search Console → Performance → filter queries containing who, what, when, how, why, can, does.
• Expand People Also Ask boxes for your main topics — each click reveals more questions.
• Ask your sales and support staff for the ten questions they answer every week.
• Group questions by topic and give each group one page; give each question one section.