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Search engine optimization is the art and science of crafting websites and other online content so they show up prominently when people Google something.
A massive industry of experts, advisors, and gurus (and charlatans) has grown up around the interplay between Google, which purposely sets opaque rules, and website owners tweaking stuff and trying to work the system.
The rise of generative AI, large language models, and AI chatbots is changing all this — radically and quickly.
While SEO has long been a cornerstone of digital marketing strategy, a new paradigm is rapidly threatening to take its place: “answer engine optimization.”
As AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity become the front door to online discovery, AEO is emerging as a strategic imperative for growth. There’s been an explosion of AEO startups and tools in recent months, all promising to help online businesses show up when chatbots and AI models answer user questions.
“There must have been 30 AEO product launches in the last few months, all trying to do what SEO did 20 years ago,” said David Slater, a chief marketing officer who’s worked at Mozilla, Salesforce, and other tech companies. “It’s absolutely going to be a hot space.”
AEO is SEO adapted for the world of conversational AI, said Ethan Smith, the CEO of the digital marketing firm Graphite Growth. He wrote an excellent blog recently about this new trend.
Where traditional SEO focused on optimizing for static keyword-driven queries, AEO centers on influencing how AI chatbots respond to user questions, he said. With tools like ChatGPT increasingly integrating real-time web search and surfacing clickable links, chat interfaces now function like hybrid search engines. The result is a fast feedback loop that makes influencing LLM outputs not just possible but also essential for online businesses.
Unlike SEO, where a landing page might target a single keyword, AEO pages must address clusters of related questions. Smith shared an example: Instead of optimizing a webpage for “project management software,” AEO pages might answer dozens or even hundreds of variations, such as, “What’s the best project management tool for remote teams?” or, “Which project management platforms support API integration?”
This shift didn’t happen overnight. When ChatGPT launched in late 2022, its responses were generated from outdated training data with no live web access. But over the past year, LLMs have started using retrieval-augmented generation and other techniques that help them incorporate more real-time information. They often perform a live online search, for instance, and then summarize results in real time. This makes AEO both faster to influence and more dynamic than its SEO predecessor, Smith wrote.
There’s been some interest in AEO for about a year or so. But in early 2025, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other generative AI services began surfacing prominent links and citations in answers a lot more. That’s when AEO really took off.
Now AEO startups are raising venture capital, some online businesses are seeing conversion spikes from AI traffic, and there’s been a Cambrian explosion of AEO analytics, tracking, and content tools.
Check out this list of AEO startups and tools, identified by Smith from Graphite Growth. There are a few established players in here, too, including HubSpot. (Overall, there are a lot, so click on the button in the top right of this table to see all the options.)
There’s already a race to determine how these AI chatbots spit out results and recommendations so that website owners can hack their way to better online distribution in the new era of generative AI and large language models.
GPTrends is one of these up-and-coming AEO providers. David Kaufman, one of the entrepreneurs behind the firm, shared an analysis recently on LinkedIn.
He said that AI search results from tools such as ChatGPT and Perplexity are unpredictable. They can change even when you ask the same question multiple times. Unlike Google, where search results stay mostly the same, AI tools give different answers depending on how the model responds in the moment, Kaufman wrote.
For example, Kaufman and his colleagues asked ChatGPT this question 100 times: “What’s the best support ticketing software?” Then they tracked which providers appeared most often. Here are the results of the test:
Zendesk showed up in 94% of answers, while other companies, including Freshworks and Zoho, appeared less often and in different positions. This randomness gives less-well-known brands a better shot at being seen, at least some of the time.
“Strategically,” Kaufman wrote, “this means brands need to rethink how they optimize for discovery, focusing less on traditional SEO tactics and more on comprehensive, authoritative content that AI systems recognize as valuable.”
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