What is AEO (AI Engine Optimization)?

For two decades, being found online meant one thing: ranking on Google. You picked keywords, built content and backlinks, and watched your position in a results page.

That's changing. A growing share of buying research now starts with a question typed into Claude, ChatGPT, or Grok — not a search box. The assistant doesn't return ten blue links; it gives a synthesized answer, and it either mentions your product or it doesn't.

AEO — AI Engine Optimization — is the discipline of making sure it does. Instead of optimizing a page for a keyword, you're optimizing your presence for the questions an AI is likely to be asked, and the way an AI is likely to describe your category.

The mechanics are different from SEO. There's no backlink graph to game and no meta description to tune. What matters is whether your site's content clearly establishes what you do, who it's for, and why — in language a model would naturally reuse when answering a related question.

The first step is visibility: you can't improve a ranking you can't see. That's the gap Scan My AEO fills — it tells you, per platform, whether you're being mentioned at all.