AEO

AEO predates the current AI wave. Featured snippets, People Also Ask, knowledge panels and voice assistants had already moved search toward direct answers, and they established the thing that still governs it: the unit of retrieval is the passage, not the page. A 3,000-word guide can contain the right answer and lose to a competitor who put it in sixty self-contained words under a heading that asks the question.

The practical work is unglamorous. Headings phrased the way people ask; an answer immediately underneath that reads correctly out of context, with no “as mentioned above”; definitions carrying one real, dated number; comparisons stated explicitly rather than implied. It is worth being clear about what AEO is not: Google’s own guidance for its generative features says structured data is not required and there is no special markup to add. Schema earns its place for rich results and entity resolution — it is not the lever here.

Measurement is the weak point, because an answer shown without a click leaves little trace in analytics. The workable substitute is a fixed set of questions re-asked on a schedule and scored the same way each time, which is how the launch plan handles it; the AI search guide covers the rest of the stack.