What is AEO? A plain guide for B2B marketing teams

When a buyer asks ChatGPT “What is the best CRM for startups?”, they get a short list, not ten blue links. If your brand is not on that list, you are not in the deal. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), also called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), is the work of earning a place in those answers.

How AI assistants pick brands

AI models do not rank pages the way search engines do. They summarize what the web says about a topic. The brands that appear are the ones mentioned often, clearly and by sources the model trusts: comparison articles, review sites, documentation, forums and your own pages.

What AEO changes for your team

Classic SEO asks “Where do we rank?”. AEO asks three new questions: Are we mentioned? In what position? And which sources made the AI say that? A rank tracker cannot show any of this, because it happens inside the answer.

A simple weekly routine

Pick the 50–100 questions your buyers actually ask. Check how each AI model answers them every week. Note where competitors appear and you do not, find the sources behind those answers, then create or fix the pages and earn mentions on the sites the AI already cites.

What AEO cannot do

No tool can change how a model works. AEO changes what the model finds about you on the web. That takes weeks, not hours, but the gains compound: every clear comparison page and every credible mention makes the next answer more likely to include you.