The evolution of search

Search is changing — fast. Instead of typing short keywords into a search bar and choosing from a list of links, people are now asking full, conversational questions and receiving direct answers generated by AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini, and Copilot.

These answer engines don’t return your carefully written page titles or descriptions. They rewrite your content into their words, shaping how people understand your brand, your products, and your expertise.

That shift creates both a challenge and an opportunity. And that’s where Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) comes in.

What is AEO?

AEO is the practice of helping AI-powered search systems understand your content more clearly, represent your brand accurately, and cite you more often in generated answers.

When someone asks an AI tool a question like “What’s the best platform for building a marketing site?”, the answer they see is not a list of links.  It’s a rewritten narrative, and it might misrepresent your brand, omit important details, cite competitors instead, or skip you entirely.

AEO helps you influence that narrative by making your content easier for LLMs (large language models) to understand, trust, and use.

Watch this overview to see how AI answer engines reshape discovery, and why preparing your content for AI matters.

AEO vs SEO: how they relate

AEO isn’t a replacement for SEO — it’s the next step after strong SEO foundations.

• SEO helps search engines find and index your content through structure, performance, metadata, content quality, and crawlability.
• AEO helps AI engines understand and represent your content through clarity, question-first content, semantics, structure, schema, authority, and mentions.

If SEO is about being found, AEO is about being chosen and described correctly.

The good news? Much of what you’ve already learned about SEO still applies. Clear hierarchy, semantic HTML, fast performance, and strong metadata all support AEO as well.

Why AEO is becoming essential

AI answer engines are changing how people search and what they expect in return.

People are asking longer, more conversational questions. They’re expecting a single, clear, trustworthy answer. And AI systems are evaluating content differently — prioritizing clarity, structure, freshness, and authority over traditional ranking signals alone.

These systems also rely heavily on how often a brand is mentioned and referenced across the web, not just how many links point to it.

And importantly: this shift is still early.

Many companies haven’t adapted their content or technical foundations yet. That means small, strategic improvements can make a meaningful difference in how — and whether — your brand appears in AI-generated answers.

At its core, AEO emphasizes:

• Answering real questions directly
• Structuring content so AI systems can parse it
• Building authority through accurate, consistent mentions
• Keeping content fresh, clear, and up to date

As search becomes more conversational, AEO helps your brand become part of that conversation.

What you’ll learn in this course

Throughout this course, you’ll learn how to:

• Optimize your site for AEO and the four pillars that shape it
• Evaluate your site using the AEO Maturity Model
• Build answer-focused, question-driven content
• Strengthen authority through mentions, reviews, and thought leadership
• Use Webflow features like schema markup and llms.txt to guide AI systems
• Track and analyze AI traffic to refine your strategy
• Understand how AI describes your brand — and how to influence it

By the end, you’ll know how to evolve your SEO foundations into an AEO strategy that helps your brand appear more often, more accurately, and more favorably in AI-generated answers.

Ready to dive in?

Click Complete & continue to head to the next lesson, where we’ll explore the four pillars of AEO — the proven framework for appearing more often (and more accurately) in AI-generated answers.

Need help finding your way around? Learn how to navigate Webflow University lessons, courses, and learning paths, including how to mark items complete.