What is AEO?
A plain-English guide to Answer Engine Optimization, why it matters now, and how small businesses can get found by AI tools like ChatGPT.
If you’ve heard the term AEO floating around and felt a little dread, you’re not alone. I talk to business owners every week who know something has shifted in how people search, but they’d rather not think about it too hard, because it sounds like one more thing to learn, one more thing to fear falling behind on. I get it. But burying your head in the sand doesn’t stop your traffic from changing. It just means you find out the hard way, usually when you notice fewer calls coming in and can’t figure out why.
So let’s talk about what AEO actually is, in plain English, and why it’s genuinely good news for a business like yours.
What AEO Actually Means
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making your website visible and useful to the AI tools that are now answering people’s questions directly, instead of just handing them a list of links. That includes Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot. You might also hear it called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) or LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization). Different label, same idea: instead of competing for a spot on a results page, you’re trying to be the business the AI actually mentions by name.
I’ve been digging into a new AEO training from Ahrefs, taught by Sam Oh, and a few numbers from the first lesson explain why this matters right now, not in some vague future.
As of December 2025, when Google’s AI Overviews began to show up on a search…
- It cut the click-through rate for the number one ranking result by 58 percent. That means a page that used to reliably bring in visitors is now losing more than half of those clicks to the AI-generated answer sitting above it.
- ChatGPT alone has 900 million weekly users and now handles roughly 12 percent of the volume Google search does.
- And AI-driven traffic to websites has grown nearly 10 times over in the past year.
Here’s the part I actually find reassuring, though. Ahrefs shared their own data showing that in June 2025, AI search made up just half a percent of their total traffic, but it accounted for over 12 percent of their signups, a conversion rate 23 times higher than their organic traffic. When someone finds you through an AI answer, they’ve usually already had their question answered and are deciding who to trust, not just browsing. That’s a warmer lead walking through your door.
AEO Doesn’t Replace SEO, It Builds On It
If you’ve spent any time getting your website’s SEO right, breathe easy. None of that work is wasted. Good SEO, like solid content, real expertise, technical health, is still the foundation everything else sits on.
AEO is what you layer on top of your SEO foundation so AI tools can actually read, trust, and cite what you’ve built.
Sam Oh made a comparison in the course that stuck with me. Back around 2010, everyone said mobile apps were going to kill the web. Only old people would still use websites, they said. Apps did explode. But the web didn’t die, it grew right alongside them. AI search is likely following the same pattern. It’s growing fast, but Google still processes billions of searches a day, and traditional organic traffic still drives real business. The move isn’t to panic and abandon what’s working. It’s to play both games at once.
What This Actually Means for Your Business
This is where I want to bring it back down to earth, because “optimize for AI” can sound abstract until you break it into steps that actually fit into a small business’s week.
Find out where you stand first. Before you change anything, you need to know what AI tools currently see when they look at your site. I conduct AI Visibility Audits for exactly this reason, it’s the same process that took my own site from a visibility score of 57 to a 92, and took a Fort Worth marriage coach’s site from a 48 to a 90 using the same content, no redesign required.
You can’t fix what you haven’t measured.
Write new content with AEO in mind from the start. Going forward, every new page or post you publish can be built to answer the specific questions your future clients are actually asking AI tools, not just the keywords you’d type into Google five years ago. That’s a shift in structure and clarity more than a shift in effort.
Give your old content a second life. Most businesses I work with already have years of blog posts, service pages, and FAQs sitting on their site. Rather than starting over, the smarter move is usually rewriting and restructuring what’s already there so AI tools can actually find and trust it. That old content isn’t dead weight, it’s a head start most of your competitors don’t have.
You’re Probably Closer Than You Think
If you’ve already got decent SEO fundamentals in place, you’re not behind, you’re ahead of most of your competitors who haven’t even started thinking about this yet. The businesses that are going to struggle aren’t the ones who are new to AEO. They’re the ones who decide not to look at all.
You didn’t start your business to become an SEO or AI expert, and you shouldn’t have to. That’s what I’m here for. If you’re curious where your own site stands right now, an AI Visibility Audit is the easiest place to start, no pressure, no long-term contract, just a clear picture of what’s working and what to fix first.
Book a Free Strategy Session: https://sosmymarketing.com/contact/
Sources: This post draws on the first lesson of Ahrefs’ Answer Engine Optimization course, taught by Sam Oh. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/MLKgbeDeCxU.
Course and data credit: Ahrefs (https://ahrefs.com/).