The AEO shelf

The practice of making your brand the answer AI engines give. SEO gets you ranked on a results page; AEO gets you named inside the response. Also called GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) — same idea, different acronym.

Any tool that answers a question directly instead of returning links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Copilot. The output is a synthesized answer, and brands either appear in it or don't.

In ChatGPT's ad platform, a one-to-two-sentence description of the buyer conversation where you want your ad to appear. Replaces keyword targeting; matched to live conversations by meaning. See our ChatGPT ads guide for examples of weak and strong hints.

A thing the machines can identify without ambiguity: your company, your product line, your founder. AI engines reason in entities, not keywords. If your company's data is inconsistent across the web, you're a fuzzy entity, and fuzzy entities don't get recommended.

Google's structured database of entities and their relationships; the knowledge panel is its visible face on a search results page. Claiming and completing yours is step one of the framework because most AI engines lean on this data.

The source link an engine attaches to a claim in its answer. Getting cited is the AEO equivalent of ranking #1. Track which sources get cited for your buyers' questions and aim to be in them.

Running a fixed list of buyer questions through AI engines on a schedule and logging whether your brand appears, where, and against which competitors. The prompt generator builds the question list; an hour a month does the rest.

ChatGPT ads' pricing model: you pay when a user interacts with your ad, not when it's shown. Different from CPC (pay per click) and CPM (pay per thousand impressions).

Machine-readable labels in your page code that tell engines what things are: this is a product, this is its price, this is a FAQ. Free to add, invisible to visitors, and one of the few AEO levers entirely within your control.

The AI-generated summary Google places above traditional results. It reaches over 1.5 billion people a month, and it answers many questions so completely that nobody scrolls to the links below — which is why click-through data keeps falling while research keeps happening.