Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the work of making your product data readable enough that an AI assistant names your products when a shopper asks for something like them.
What AEO means for a store
A search engine ranks pages and leaves the shopper to scan them. An answer engine writes one answer and names a few products in it. Getting named has little to do with links or keywords and a lot to do with whether the assistant can read the facts the question turns on. AEO is the set of changes that make those facts readable: attributes filled in, standard values instead of your own shade names, structured data on the page, feeds in the channels the assistants ingest, and the crawlers allowed in.
How it differs from SEO
SEO earns you a position; AEO earns you a mention in advice the shopper takes at face value. They share foundations, fast pages and clean markup among them, but AEO is judged product by product, on the data, and a store can rank well in search for years and still never be named by an assistant. Catalogues with excellent search traffic can still score a D on readiness for exactly this reason.
What Sighted does
Sighted scores every product on the data an assistant reads, writes the missing fields from your own descriptions, options and photos in your brand voice, publishes what you approve to your store, Merchant Center and the ChatGPT and Perplexity feeds, and checks on a schedule whether the assistants name you.
See how the assistants read your store.