Do AI answers cite you?

A plain-English intro to Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — why brands get named in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar tools, and what “AI visibility” actually means.

What is Answer Engine Optimization?

Search used to mean a list of blue links. Today, tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot often synthesize an answer: they pull from the open web, their training data, and (sometimes) live retrieval, then write a response in their own words.

In that world, your brand either gets cited or mentioned — or it disappears into the summary. AEO is the practice of making your company easy for answer engines to understand, trust, and surface when someone asks about your category.

What “AI visibility” means

AI visibility is whether (and how) AI systems mention you when people ask questions you’d want to own: category queries (“best X for Y”), comparison queries, and “who should I use?” prompts. Traditional SEO still matters for crawling and ranking pages — but ranking page one doesn’t guarantee you’ll show up in a synthesized answer.

That’s why SEO alone isn’t enough anymore. You can win organic traffic and still be invisible in the chat window where a buyer is making a shortlist.

A practical AEO checklist

• Entity clarity — Make who you are unambiguous: consistent name, what you do, who you serve, on your site and across profiles.
• Citable sources — Publish clear, factual pages (docs, comparisons, methodology) that an answer engine can quote or ground on.
• FAQ / schema-ish thinking — Answer real buyer questions in plain language; structure content so machines can extract Q&A pairs.
• Consistent brand mentions — Same spelling, positioning, and category language across your site, LinkedIn, directories, and press.
• Third-party corroboration — Reviews, roundups, and independent mentions help models treat you as a real, referenceable brand.
• Monitor AI answers — Periodically ask category and competitor prompts and note whether you’re cited, misattributed, or absent.