What AEO is, and why B2B buyers ask an assistant first

From ten links to one answer

A search engine returns a list and lets the buyer choose. An assistant reads on the buyer's behalf and returns a paragraph, often with three to five names in it. There is no second page and no position eleven: you are in the answer, or you are not compared.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the discipline of being readable, understandable and quotable by those assistants. You will also see it called GEO, generative engine optimization. The names describe the same job.

Why it matters more in B2B

B2B buyers do a lot of their research before they ever speak to sales, and the questions they ask an assistant are shortlist questions: which tools do this for a company like ours, what are the alternatives to the one we have, does it work with our CRM, what does it cost. Those are exactly the questions where an assistant assembles a short list of vendors.

A consumer brand loses a click when it is missing from an answer. A B2B company can lose a place on a shortlist that decides a contract worth a year of someone's salary.

Where the answer comes from

An assistant's answer draws on two sources. The first is what the model learned in training: a snapshot of the web taken months earlier, which you cannot edit quickly. The second is what it retrieves at the moment of the question: results from a search index and pages it fetches live.

Different crawlers serve those two sources. Training crawlers such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot collect pages for future models. Search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot build the index an assistant searches. User-triggered fetchers such as ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User open a page because a person asked something just now. Retrieval is the part you can influence fastest.

What carries over from SEO

Good SEO foundations still count: pages that load and can be crawled, clear titles, sensible internal links and real expertise. What changes is the reader. A model summarizing your page rewards plain statements of fact over clever copy, and it leans heavily on what other sites say about you: directories, reviews, comparisons and community threads.

This course follows the four questions an assistant has to answer about any company. Can it read you (lesson 2)? Can it understand you (lesson 3)? Does it know who you are (lesson 4)? Have you pointed it at what matters (lesson 5)? Lesson 6 is how you find out whether any of it worked.