What Is AEO in AI Optimization?
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
And why small businesses and law firms should care
Looking at you, Waynesville business owners. Same for Asheville, Clyde, and all our entrepreneurs across Western North Carolina. You’ve probably noticed AI answers popping up everywhere — on mobile, desktop, and inside apps like Grok, ChatGPT, and Google Gemini.
As a searcher? AI makes things easier.
As someone running a local marketing firm? It makes things… interesting. Let’s call it a new challenge for my marketing team.
Why?
Because My Local Start ranks well for the money terms we target in Google. Now, with Answer Engines in the mix, we have to make sure AI systems quote us, cite us, and recommend us too — you know, as the best AI optimization company in Western North Carolina.
If you own a local business, you already know you have a handful of “money terms” you care about. For example, if you’re a car accident attorney in Waynesville, you want to rank:
- in Google Business Profile (Google Maps), and
- in Google search (the classic blue links) when someone searches “Waynesville car accident lawyer” or “car accident lawyer near me.”
Now add something new: Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode.
How would you get your website to show up there? AI optimization or AEO for local businesses.
Full disclosure: after doing SEO for close to 30 years, all these new acronyms feel the same to me. They’re all SEO. People rename the work, but the work hasn’t changed (much).
On with the show…
What is AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It’s the practice of structuring your content so search engines, and now AI systems, can easily understand your answers and surface them directly when customers ask questions.
Why AEO matters for your local business
Visibility. Simple as that. Your brand needs to be cited by answer engines. If your website isn’t well-optimized in Google today, chances are it won’t appear in any AI answers tomorrow.
What should websites focus on when optimizing for answer engines?
Focus on doing basic SEO correctly. I’ll repeat this forever: if your SEO is weak, your AEO will be weak too. You can’t optimize on a rocky foundation.
Basic best practices for AEO (and SEO):
- Write in a clear, direct voice.
- Break information into scannable sections: FAQs, bullets, definitions.
- Use natural-language questions your customers actually ask.
- Provide complete answers that AI tools can quote without rewriting.
- Match the intent behind real-world searches.
- Use consistent schema (FAQ, How-To, LocalBusiness, Attorney schema). Not a dealbreaker — Google ranks plenty of sites without schema but basic schema like your address is worth doing correctly.
- Get good backlinks.
- Get good, legitimate reviews from real customers.
When done right, AEO positions you as the trusted source across multiple platforms.
Bottom line
The truth about AEO, AI optimization, and what actually works
I don’t know where things are headed with AI in content marketing and SEO. There are too many unknowns right now. I’m not seeing a flood of referrals from AI platforms, but they do exist. One of our attorney clients actually landed and closed a lead that came straight from ChatGPT.
The important part? We didn’t do anything special for AEO. We just did SEO correctly.
That’s the baseline lesson for me: all of this “AI optimization” talk still comes down to the same fundamentals we’ve used for decades. ChatGPT pulls from Google. Gemini pulls from Google. Perplexity pulls from Google.
If your website doesn’t rank in Google, you are less likely or are not going to show up in answer engines.
So don’t lose sleep over acronyms, rethink your SEO strategy. Build strong pages, match search intent, earn trust, get reviews, get valuable backlinks, build authority, optimize locally for Google Business Profile, and get on social platforms too.
If your website isn’t ranking or you’re not showing up where you need to be, reach out. We’ll take a look and figure out the smartest way to get your online marketing working for you.