We already covered why GEO is mostly noise. Now meet its cousin: AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation. Same energy, different acronym, equally overblown.
AEO is the idea that search is shifting from keyword queries to conversational questions, and that you need a new optimisation discipline to capture the “answer engines” — voice assistants, featured snippets, position zero results. The argument goes: Google, Alexa, Siri, and ChatGPT are all becoming answer engines, and if you don’t optimise specifically for answers, you’ll be invisible.
It’s not entirely wrong. But the conclusion the industry draws from it — that you need AEO as a separate practice — absolutely is.
What Actually Happened to Voice Search
Cast your mind back to around 2017–2019. Every marketing conference had a keynote about voice search. “By 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice.” Brands were told to restructure their entire content strategy around conversational queries. Agencies launched voice search optimisation packages.
Then 2020 arrived. And 2021. And 2022. Voice search didn’t eat traditional search. People use voice for simple commands — “set a timer”, “call Mum”, “what’s the weather” — not for complex purchasing decisions or in-depth research. When someone wants to choose an accountant, compare software packages, or understand a business problem, they type. The nuance and control of typed search hasn’t been replaced by asking Alexa.
The voice search revolution was real in narrow contexts. As a fundamental shift in how people research and buy things? It didn’t happen. The agencies who sold voice search optimisation packages in 2019 have mostly rebranded those packages as AEO or GEO packages in 2024.
Featured Snippets Are Real — But They’re Just SEO
To be fair, there’s something genuinely important buried inside AEO: featured snippets. These are the boxes that appear above organic results when Google decides it can directly answer a query. Position zero. The answer box. Whatever you want to call it.
Getting your content into a featured snippet can significantly increase visibility — particularly for informational queries where someone’s looking for a quick answer. This is worth optimising for.
But here’s the thing: getting into featured snippets is not a new discipline. It has always been a function of good on-page SEO. Specifically:
- Answering the question clearly and directly, early in the content
- Using proper heading structure so Google understands what each section is about
- Formatting answers as concise paragraphs, lists, or tables depending on the query type
- Having sufficient authority on the topic for Google to trust your answer
Every single one of those things is standard SEO practice. Featured snippet optimisation has been a documented SEO tactic since at least 2016. Calling it AEO and charging a premium for it is repackaging.
The “People Also Ask” Opportunity
One area where the AEO conversation does have genuine practical value: the “People Also Ask” boxes that now dominate Google results for most informational queries. These expand to show answers, and each one you click generates more questions.
Appearing in PAA boxes is valuable real estate — often more than organic results for informational queries. And there IS a specific way to go after them: structure your content to answer related questions clearly, using the actual phrasing people use, with direct answers in the first sentence or two.
But again — this is just good content strategy informed by keyword research. You look at what questions people are actually asking, write clear answers to them, structure the page properly. That’s SEO. It has always been SEO.
The Real Problem AEO Is Pointing At
Strip away the buzzword and AEO is gesturing at something real: a lot of content is written for algorithms rather than humans, and it fails at actually answering questions directly.
The typical SEO blog post from 2015–2020 was 2,000 words of padding that took eight paragraphs to get to the point, because “longer content ranks better” was the conventional wisdom. That approach is now actively penalised by Google’s helpful content updates, and it’s terrible for featured snippets and PAA boxes because you need direct answers, not waffle.
If AEO gets people to write more directly and structure content around real questions rather than keyword density, that’s fine. But that’s a writing quality issue, not a new technical discipline.
What You Should Actually Do
Ignore AEO as a thing. Do this instead:
- Research the actual questions people ask around your topic. Google’s autocomplete, PAA boxes, and tools like AnswerThePublic show you the real language people use.
- Answer questions directly. First sentence, clear answer. Then expand if needed. Not the other way around.
- Use structured heading hierarchies. H2 for main sections, H3 for sub-questions. This is how both humans and Google navigate content.
- Use lists and tables where appropriate. These are what Google pulls into featured snippets and PAA boxes. A wall of prose rarely gets featured.
- Build topical authority. Google trusts sites that cover a topic deeply and consistently. A cluster of well-written, interconnected articles on a subject beats a single optimised post every time.
None of that is AEO. It’s just good SEO, written clearly, for humans first.
The Pattern Here Is Bigger Than AEO
GEO. AEO. Voice search optimisation. Before that, mobile SEO (which was real but overhyped), then schema markup as a magic bullet, then social signals as a ranking factor.
The SEO industry has a structural incentive to invent new urgency. If everything that matters is the same as it was five years ago — write genuinely useful content, structure it properly, build real authority — then there’s no new product to sell. So new acronyms get coined, new fears get stoked, and the fundamentals get repackaged.
The businesses that do best at SEO are almost always the ones that ignore the noise and consistently do the basics well. That was true in 2010. It’s true now. It’ll be true when whatever comes after AEO gets its own acronym.
