The shift happened quietly. One quarter you’re tracking keyword rankings; the next, your best-fit buyers are describing their problem to ChatGPT and accepting whatever answer comes back, without clicking a single result.
The new buyer journey
For B2B software, the discovery phase has moved. A Head of Risk at a Series C fintech isn’t starting on Google anymore. They’re asking an AI assistant to evaluate their options, compare vendors, and shortlist the credible players.
If your company isn’t in that answer, you don’t exist in that buyer’s consideration set. Full stop.
What AEO actually is
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your brand, your expertise, and your positioning reliably cited by AI assistants, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, when they respond to buyer-intent queries in your space.
It’s not about gaming prompts. It’s about becoming the kind of source that AI engines trust: well-structured content, authoritative third-party citations, consistent entity presence, and a brand signal strong enough that models learn to associate you with your category.
The relationship with SEO
Here’s what trips people up: AEO doesn’t replace SEO. The underlying signals are largely the same, topical authority, backlink quality, content depth, structured data. The difference is where they surface.
Good SEO gets you ranked. Good AEO gets you cited. Both matter. A buyer might encounter your brand in a ChatGPT answer, then confirm it with a Google search. Lose either leg and the journey breaks.
What to do about it
1. Own your entity. Your brand needs a clean, consistent presence across Wikipedia, Crunchbase, LinkedIn, and your website. AI models build entity graphs, you want your company firmly in the right one.
2. Create the content AI answers cite. Think definitional guides, comparison pages, and benchmark reports. These are the content types that get pulled into AI responses.
3. Build third-party authority. G2 reviews, analyst coverage, trade press mentions, these are citations AI engines learn from.
4. Measure citation rate, not just rankings. You need tooling that monitors how often your brand appears in AI-generated answers. If you’re not measuring it, you can’t improve it.
The companies who sort this out in the next 12 months will own category positions that are genuinely hard to displace. The window is open, but it won’t be open forever.