# What is AEO? Answer Engine Optimization explained for Norwegian businesses AEO means being the source when Google, ChatGPT or Perplexity answers your customer's question. Mostly it is good SEO with the answer up front. Source: https://ibenta.no/en/blog/what-is-aeo-answer-engine-optimization Publisher: Ibenta (https://ibenta.no) Published: 2026-09-30 --- AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. It is the work of making your website the source when Google, ChatGPT or Perplexity answers a customer's question directly. For most Norwegian businesses, it is ordinary SEO with more discipline about answering. The term is everywhere this year, and agencies have started selling it as a separate service. Here is what it means, what actually helps and what you can skip. ## An answer engine gives an answer, not a list A search engine gives you ten links. An answer engine reads the pages for you and writes a reply. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode do this, and so do ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. Below the reply sit links to the pages it was built on. AEO is about being one of those links. Better still, being the business the answer names. ## AEO, GEO and SEO are mostly the same job You will also meet the term GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. It comes from a [research paper published in November 2023](https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735) and covers practically the same ground as AEO. The link to SEO matters more. Google's [guide to AI features in Search](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisations needed. The page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google with a snippet. That is the same bar as an ordinary search result. So AEO does not replace SEO. It stands on top of it. A page Google cannot find will not turn up in Google's AI answers either. ## Write sentences an answer engine can lift Answer engines quote sentences that make sense on their own. A page that opens with "Welcome, we have been passionate about quality since 1998" gives them nothing to use. A page that opens with "We replace bathroom floors in Bergen, and a standard bathroom takes about two weeks" gives them a fact, a place and a trade. Put the question in the heading and the answer in the first two sentences below it. Write out the facts customers ask for in plain text: what you do, where, for whom, roughly what it costs and how soon you can start. A price hidden in a PDF or an image is much harder to quote. Name the place. People ask "who services heat pumps in Tromsø", and an answer engine can only name you if your page says Tromsø. This is where a Norwegian business has an edge. A question in Norwegian about a service in a specific town has far fewer possible sources than the same question in English about a big city. A clear page in plain bokmål may be one of a handful that fits. That is also why we write service pages answer first when we build a website: what it is, who it is for, what it costs and where. The selling comes after the answer, not instead of it. ## What you do not need to buy AEO has become a product, and some of what is sold with it is not worth your money. Special AI files are the clearest example. On the same page, Google writes that you do not need to create new machine-readable files, AI text files or markup, and that there is no special schema.org structured data you need to add. A file like llms.txt does no harm, but it is not what decides whether you get quoted. FAQ markup is the other one. An FAQ section built from questions real customers ask is useful to people and answer engines alike. But since August 2023, [Google only shows FAQ rich results](https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes) for well-known, authoritative government and health websites. Selling FAQ schema to a plumber as a visibility boost is selling a tactic that stopped working three years ago. Structured data for your business name, address and opening hours is still sensible. It is just not a shortcut into AI answers. ## Check that the door is open Sometimes the problem is technical and takes five minutes to fix. OpenAI's [documentation for its crawlers](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots) states that sites which opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. A robots.txt file copied from another site, or a security setting that blocks AI bots across the board, can shut you out without anyone noticing. OpenAI runs two separate bots. GPTBot collects material for training its models, and OAI-SearchBot fetches pages for search. Blocking the first while allowing the second is a sensible setup for most businesses: no free training material, but still a place in the answers. ## What you can do today Write down the three questions customers ask you most often, in their own words. Ask each one in ChatGPT and in Google, with your town added. Note who gets named and which pages appear as sources. Then look for the answer to each question on your own website. If it takes more than one click, or the answer is not written out, that is your first AEO job. Put the question as a heading on the right page and answer it in two sentences. Finally, type your domain followed by /robots.txt into a browser. Check that it does not block OAI-SearchBot or Googlebot. If you want a second pair of eyes, our [free website audit](/en/tools/website-audit) checks whether your robots.txt lets ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI in, and how much of your content can be read without JavaScript. You get the score in a minute, and it costs nothing.