Definition
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) means optimizing your content to be selected and cited by AI-powered answer engines and search features.
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content so that AI tools - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and others - can extract, trust, and cite it in their responses to user queries.
Traditional SEO earns rankings. AEO earns citations. The distinction matters because AI tools don't rank ten blue links and let the user decide - they synthesize an answer from sources they trust and name those sources in their response. If your content isn't structured to be extractable, specific, and credibly attributed, it gets used without attribution or skipped entirely.
For B2B Webflow sites, AEO is particularly relevant because your buyers increasingly start their research in AI tools before they ever reach Google. A marketing leader asking ChatGPT "what's the best way to manage a Webflow migration?" is a buyer at the start of a sales cycle. Being cited in that answer is the equivalent of ranking position one - except with no click required for the brand impression to land.
Go deeper: What is Webflow AEO? How to get cited by AI search engines
