Unlike traditional search engines, answer engines aim to deliver immediate responses to users’ questions, increasingly augmented by citations linking to original web sources.
For content creators, this shift presents an exciting opportunity: by optimising for answer engines, you can significantly increase your brand’s visibility and authority.
Creating content with answer engine optimisation (AEO) could result in your content being chosen to provide the definitive answer to a user query – whether that’s in a large language model (LLM) chat interface, via a voice assistant, or on a search results page.
Here are five essentials to bear in mind if you want your content to stand out in this new landscape.
1. Understand user intent
AEO is all about understanding your target audience and answering their specific questions. Research what your audience is really asking – look for how, what, when, where and why queries are relevant to your topic. Tailor content to address these needs clearly and concisely.
Tools such as answerthepublic.com and alsoasked.com are helpful in turning a seed question into a suite of queries, as asked by real internet users, around which you can create your content.
2. Structure content for clarity
Break your content into well-defined sections. Use clear headings, lists and bullet points. Answer engines favour content that is easy to scan and digest, making it more likely your article will be extracted and featured in results.
3. Use schema markup
Implementing structured data (schema) helps answer engines understand your content’s context.
Structured data can tell both answer and search engines that your content is a recipe, a product page, a ‘how to’ guide or a list of FAQs, or even that it is ‘speakable’ for smart assistants. This extra layer of information can improve how your content is interpreted and used in response to users’ queries.
4. Prioritise authority and accuracy
Answer engines are looking for trustworthy, expert sources.
Identify content themes allied with your brand’s natural areas of expertise and build out content hubs that establish the breadth of your experience in these areas. Ensure your content is well-researched, regularly updated and links to credible references – authority and factual accuracy are key.
5. Talk to/like a human
Finally, key to success in AEO is not losing sight of the fact that your audience is human. Don’t write for the machines; create content that is unique to your brand, and valuable – interesting, informative, entertaining – to the people you are trying to reach.
If this advice seems reminiscent of search engine optimisation (SEO) best practice, and its focus on Experience-Expertise-Authority-Trust (E-E-A-T), that’s with good reason.
Although AI-focused guidance from companies such as OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Anthropic (Claude) remains hard to come by, Google at least has spoken, confirming that “the underpinnings of what Google has long advised carries across to these new experiences. Focus on your visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content.”
By embracing these principles, content creators can optimise their chances of appearing in answer engine results, increasing reach, engagement and influence in this evolving digital landscape.