what is aeo?
answer engine optimization explained 🤓
you may have heard of seo - search engine optimization. if not, very briefly, it’s trying to rank on the front page of google or any other search engine. “trying” involves many strategies: putting out a lot of relevant blogs, targeting specific keywords, and a lot more.
i’ve somehow spent the last few weeks at browserbase building automations around this optimization and have learned a ton.
with llms being an increasingly common alternative for search (prompting an llm for an answer over googling), aeo has emerged as a parallel channel for increasing online presence and top-of-funnel traffic for businesses.
aeo is answer engine optimization. it’s trying to be crawled → cited → clicked by answer engines like chatgpt, claude, gemini, and others. whether you like it or not, llm-driven traffic will outpace search engines traffic for certain query categories. so, it’s important for an llm to be very familiar with the products, terms, and mission a business puts forward.
this still looks like putting out blogs and relevant sub-pages on a website. the extra bit is tailoring specifically to this style of querying. questions sent through an llm are a lot more detailed and problem → solution focused, compared to the keyword-based search we’ve been trained to put through google in order to get the best results.
totally simplified, aeo is just seo done very well - plus some additional content structure changes built-in for llm parsing (ex. tl;dr and faq sections, and questions as headers).
it’s arguably the #1 growth marketing focus for many mid-stage startups. once you find product-market fit, how do you unlock the next order of customers, sustainably and consistently while you sleep? it’s seo and aeo, compounding passively.
today’s drops 🔎
zfellows $10,000 applications are open
embedded software engineering internship @ zipline
check out jpmorganchase’s code for good hackathon