# What Is AEO in Marketing? How AI Answers Pick Their Sources > With AEO (answer engine optimization), you can get your brand cited and recommended in ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overview and others. Published September 29, 2026 by Josh. Canonical: https://bydefault.so/blog/what-is-aeo-in-marketing-answer-engine-optimization-explained AEO (answer engine optimization) is how marketers get AI tools to name their brand and cite their pages in the answers they write, instead of only ranking as a link below them. This matters because the AI answer now shows up above the links. On informational searches with an AI Overview, [the top Google result's click-through rate fell from 7.3% to 1.6%](https://ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews-reduce-clicks-update/) between December 2023 and December 2025: ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/image-YS-zuo44McaFCHC5lULZj.png) ## What is AEO in marketing? AEO in marketing stands for answer engine optimization. It means getting AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Google AI Overviews to name your brand and cite your pages when people ask them a question. In SEO you win a blue link. In AEO you win a spot inside the answer itself. An answer engine is any tool that replies with a written answer instead of a list of links. Some answers come from what the model learned in training. Many come from a live web search the tool runs in the background, and those answers name their sources. AEO is mostly about that second group, because you can change the pages that get cited. The idea grew out of featured snippets and voice search, where Google read one answer out loud and everyone else got nothing. Jason Barnard, founder of Kalicube, says he coined the term in 2017. The term took off once ChatGPT and AI Overviews started putting a written answer on top of so many searches. ## What does an AI answer look like? An AI answer is a short written reply with small source chips next to each claim. When you google ["what is aeo in marketing"](https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+aeo+in+marketing) on (e.g. in this example from today, September 2026) , an AI Overview showed up above all the links on the page. For example, here's what a Google AI overview looks like: ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/image-LWNIHMnjtgKANpjVfOLig.png) The overview also had nine organic results. Interestingly most cited pages don't rank on page one, and most pages on page one aren't cited: | Source | Organic rank on page one | Cited in the AI Overview | | --------------------------- | ------------------------ | --------------------------- | | Reddit, r/DigitalMarketing | 1 | Yes, but a different thread | | Coursera | 2 | No | | HubSpot | 3 | Yes | | Profound | 4 | Yes | | Digital Marketing Institute | 5 | No | | Salesforce | 6 | No | | Jasper | 7 | No | | Neil Patel | 8 | No | | SEO.com | 9 | No | | The Pedowitz Group | Not on page one | Yes | | PwC | Not on page one | Yes | | Vested Marketing | Not on page one | Yes | | YouTube, Sam Belman | Not on page one | Yes | Only HubSpot and Profound got both a blue link and a citation. Four of the seven cited sources didn't rank on page one at all. The page also had four ads from Later, Ethos Ink, Semrush and Amsive, all selling AEO services. So people pay to show up on this search, but the free spot at the top went to whoever the AI decided to quote. The answer can change from day to day, so this is just a snapshot of late September 2026. ## How do answer engines decide what to cite? Answer engines write their own search queries and then cite only a few of the many pages they read. So an AI doesn't copy the top ten links, it generally uses the results of its own searches. We tested this with ChatGPT's API. One question about brand tracking tools turned into [11 search queries, which returned 82 different pages, and only 6 of them got cited](https://bydefault.so/blog/how-chatgpt-web-search-works-2026-breakdown-w-api-example). The model added words the user never typed, like the current year or brand names. Some searches were even limited to one vendor's own site. The same pattern shows up at scale: * In a study of 15,000 prompts, [89.6% triggered two or more follow-up searches](https://searchengineland.com/chatgpt-retrieved-vs-citations-study-471606), and 95% of those follow-up queries had zero search volume in keyword tools. * Across 548,534 pages that ChatGPT pulled in, [only 15% were ever cited](https://bydefault.so/blog/how-chatgpt-web-search-works-2026-breakdown-w-api-example). * When ChatGPT put a brand's name in its own search query, it [cited that brand 68.9% of the time](https://bydefault.so/blog/how-chatgpt-web-search-works-2026-breakdown-w-api-example). Pages it only fetched got cited 2.1% of the time. If the AI already connects your brand to the question, it searches for your pages by name. If it doesn't, your page competes with dozens of others the AI reads and never cites. Here is the path from one question to a handful of citations: ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/drawing-LNsZbSblO81jWU_wjGOZn.png) Each assistant does this a bit differently. We looked at 46,210 answers from eight AI assistants in ByDefault prompt runs between August 30 and September 29, 2026. For each answer, ChatGPT ran a median of 6 searches and cited 4 links. Claude ran 2 searches and cited 15 links, and Google AI Overviews ran 1 search and cited 7: ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/image-xn8NiZAmg-qycKghyuk3A.png) Codex, OpenAI's coding agent, is the only assistant in our runs that records its full list of sources. It collected a median of 49 source links per answer and cited only 8.8% of them. So even when a page makes it into the pile, it usually still doesn't get named. The pages that win often aren't brand sites. In September 2026, Reddit got [16.8% of all ChatGPT citations in US queries](https://ahrefs.com/blog/most-cited-domains-in-chatgpt/), and Wikipedia got 7%. So AEO also means getting people to talk about you on the sites the AI cites most. Four sites alone take nearly a third of all ChatGPT citations: ![Share of citations by domain, US queries, September 2026](https://cdn.bydefault.so/image-sa4EI2jgG7Nu-0s09umGg.png) Our own prompt runs look a bit different though, out of 476,264 citations in the same 30 days, Reddit got 1% and GitHub led the big public sites at 2.8%. All sites outside our top ten public sites got 92.3% of citations. When brands track questions about their own category, most citations go to smaller sites, and a good brand page can win there. ## How is AEO different from SEO and GEO? SEO gets your page ranked as a link, AEO gets your content pulled out as the direct answer, and GEO (generative engine optimization) gets your brand cited inside a longer answer an AI writes from many sources. All three need the same thing to start with, a page a search engine can find and trust. Here is how the three compare: | | Goal | Where you show up | Content that works | What you measure | | --- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------- | | SEO | [Rank higher and get clicks](https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/aeo-guide) | Blue links on Google and Bing | Pages built around a keyword | Rankings, clicks, impressions | | AEO | Be the direct answer | AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice answers, short AI replies | [Short, structured, answer-first](https://business.adobe.com/blog/aeo-vs-geo) | Answer and snippet wins, zero-click reach | | GEO | Be one of the cited sources | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and other chat answers | Longer pages with context and original facts | Citation count, share of voice in AI answers | In practice the line between AEO and GEO is thin. The same page often wins both the short answer and the long one, and the same tools track both. AEO is more of an "umbrella term" I guess. What changes from SEO is the scoreboard. A page can rank ninth and still be missing from the AI answer, as Salesforce is in the Google example above. A page can also be missing from page one and still get quoted, like PwC. ## What do marketers do for AEO? Marketers doing AEO put a direct answer at the top of each page, pack it with specific facts, get their brand mentioned on sites AI already cites, and make sure AI crawlers can read the page. Each of these follows from how answer engines search, read and quote. The changes, in the order we would make them: 1. **Answer the question in the first 40 to 60 words.** Answer engines [pull out single passages](https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/aeo-guide), so the sentence right under a heading has to work on its own. The Google Overview above opens with a definition lifted from HubSpot. 2. **Write each section so it makes sense alone.** The AI may quote the third section without reading the first. A heading phrased as the question a buyer would type, followed by its answer, gives it a clean passage to take. 3. **Put real numbers and specifics on the page.** Prices, limits, dates and test results give the AI something concrete to quote. Vague claims give it nothing a competitor's page doesn't also say. 4. **Get mentioned where the AI already looks.** Reddit, YouTube, review sites and industry blogs show up in answers again and again. A useful reply in a Reddit thread about your category can end up quoted in the AI answer. 5. **Let the AI crawlers in.** ChatGPT uses [OAI-SearchBot](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots) to find pages for its search answers, Claude uses [Claude-SearchBot](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler), and Perplexity uses [PerplexityBot](https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers). If your `robots.txt` blocks them, your pages can't show up as sources in those answers. 6. **Check the AI answer before you publish.** In ByDefault's editor, GEO Checks runs the target keyword through Google and shows whether the draft would get cited, and where. ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/tweet-xb_gvSRGJocOhXYdoTwBS.png) We ran a GEO Check on an Upstash Blob pricing post for the keyword "cloud storage pricing". The post lists exact prices, like 1 TB of free egress and $0.02 per GB after that. In this preview, we can see how Google's AI overview would rank us: ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/image-8-yZmG2D__xlsC8wGdmTj.png) ## How do you measure AEO? You measure AEO by asking AI tools the questions your buyers ask, many times, and counting how often your brand shows up, where it shows up in the answer, and which of your pages get cited. One run tells you little, because the same prompt can give a different answer an hour later. The four numbers we track: * **Visibility score:** the share of runs where the AI names your brand for a prompt. * **Average position:** where your brand lands in the answer when it is named. 1 means it came first. * **Citations:** how often an AI links to one of your pages as a source. * **Share of voice:** [your mention rate next to your competitors'](https://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing/aeo-guide) on the same prompts. Here is what that looks like for Upstash, a serverless Redis company (and the 10th fastest growing startup in 2026) in ByDefault over the 14 days ending September 29, 2026. Across 9 Redis prompts, Upstash ranks first on visibility at 64%. AWS and Redis are right behind it at 63% each, and Dragonfly is at 2%. ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/image-Mzq8nJDkbyIaCHIoCIDDW.png) Upstash shows up in 97% of answers to "which redis provider should i use" and 95% for "which redis provider is cheapest". It shows up in only 5% of answers to "how do i self host redis?" and 8% for "can you explain redis cloud pricing to me". ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/image-ax_YLrrqkFetb_854t1sx.png) Those low scores are the to-do list. A prompt at 5% is a question buyers ask where the AI has no reason to mention you yet, so it is the next page to write or the next third-party thread to be part of. This is the loop we run with every brand: ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/drawing-uXm7et20ov43tnC0lvD3G.png) Citations close the loop by showing which assistants read your site. Upstash pages got 150,999 citations in those 14 days, up 16%. Meta's AI cited them 75,476 times, Claude 43,703 times and OpenAI 18,517 times. ![](https://cdn.bydefault.so/ddHwcQOZSSdxL2-p-zcLe.png) Tools like ByDefault, [Peec, Profound and Promptwatch](https://bydefault.so/blog/best-ai-visibility-tools) all track some version of these numbers. ByDefault puts the tracking, the citation analytics and the GEO Checks in the same place you write, so a low-visibility prompt can turn into a draft on the same screen.