How It Works
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Writing and structuring a page so a machine can lift a single clear answer out of it and say that answer back — in a featured snippet, a voice assistant reply, or an AI summary at the top of a search page. The win is being the answer, not ranking in a list of links.
Origin · no single documented coiner
Credited to Jason Barnard of Kalicube, who says he coined it in 2017 and set the method out in a January 2018 white paper, “The New Face of SEO: Answer Engine Optimization,” written with Chee Lo at Trustpilot. Treat this as a claim by the person making it: the coining is his own account, secondary write-ups date it to 2017 or 2018 depending on who you read, and Google itself does not use the term. Marked uncertain for that reason.