Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your website so AI systems like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and Claude can accurately understand, summarize, and cite your business. Traditional SEO optimizes for a ranked list of links. AEO optimizes for being the source an AI quotes when someone asks a question.
It matters because buyer research increasingly starts inside an AI tool rather than on a search results page. If those systems cannot parse your content, or cite a competitor instead, you are out of the consideration set before a click ever happens.
In practice, AEO means clear question and answer content, accurate structured data, an llms.txt file, deliberate crawler permissions, and factual claims a model can verify. Webflow now builds AEO tooling into the platform, including agents that audit content and technical readability, plus reporting on LLM visibility and AI agent traffic.
