Best practices for answer engine optimization (AEO) marketing teams can't ignore (original) (raw)

A few months back, I was having a bit of a professional identity crisis — and it was all thanks to answer engine optimization (AEO) best practices.

Before 2024, I spent the better part of a decade focused on topping search engine result pages, and, frankly, I was great at it. I knew the ins and outs of keywords, schema, and even technical SEO aspects like site speed.

But with the rise of AI, those skills were slowly becoming less urgent, for lack of a better word. (Cue marketer existential panic.)

Search and consumer behavior have changed dramatically. While traditional search engines still dominate, people increasingly turn to AI tools like ChatGPT to answer their questions. Heck, with 79% of those who already use AI for search believing it offers a better experience than traditional search engines, even Google has introduced AI overviews to stay competitive.

This shift demands a new approach and skills for digital marketers like me. Unfortunately, AEO is generally a mystery to businesses and marketers alike, but at HubSpot, we're slowly putting together the pieces.

We’ve been researching and experimenting with how we produce and format content for AI and loop marketing for almost a year. In this article, I’ll share some of the most critical AEO best practices we’ve uncovered.

Table of Contents

• TLDR
• What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
• Why Answer Engine Optimization Matters Now More Than Ever
• Best practices for Answer Engine Optimization
• How does Loop Marketing fit into AEO?
• Technical AEO Checklist
• Common AI Engine Optimization Challenges
• Frequently Asked Questions About AEO Best Practices

TLDR

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the process of making your content easy for AI-powered systems — like Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT — to find, understand, and cite. Unlike traditional SEO, AEO focuses on direct answers, structured data, and authority signals that help your brand appear in zero-click results and AI summaries.

To get started, map user questions, structure content for quick answers, add the right schema markup for AEO, and track your visibility with tools like HubSpot's AI Search Grader. Ready to see where you stand? Check it for free.

At its core, answer engine optimization is the strategic practice of structuring your content so AI-powered systems can easily extract, understand, and present it as authoritative answers.

Many in the industry also refer to related terms like generative engine optimization (GEO) or large language model optimization (LLMO), but “AEO” emphasizes the answer.

When someone asks ChatGPT for marketing advice, queries Google for a quick definition, or speaks to Alexa about local services, AEO determines whether your brand is cited in the response.

How is AEO different from SEO?

When people use a search engine, they get back what the tool thinks are the best resources to answer their question. Like if I searched the very scientific question of “what are the best action movies of all time?”, it would give me a bunch of different resources (websites, videos, even forum responses), which it believes could offer the information I’m looking for.

That’s why the goal of t raditional SEO is to increase rankings, clicks, and, in turn, website traffic.

As marketers, that means targeting keywords, building backlinks, securing a place on page one, if not position one, and tracking impressions, click-through rates, and organic sessions. (All that good stuff I used to tackle.)

Read: 8 SEO Challenges Brands Face [HubSpot Blog Data]

Answer engines don’t just give users possible resources; they attempt to provide the exact answer they want.

For example, if I ask ChatGPT for the best action movies of all time, it’ll give me a list compiled from many sources rather than simply linking to some pages for me to check out.

Because of that, the goal of AEO is citations and inclusion in those answers.

But search engines are not excluded from this either. AEO helps brands appear in featured snippets, knowledge panels, and even voice searches. It's what helped populate that "popular action movies" carousel at the top of our SERP example.

As marketers, you need to structure your content for extraction, use schema markup to clarify meaning, and build authority so language models trust and reference your expertise. And you’ll track success with the number of zero-click answers, AI summaries, and voice responses, even when users never visit your website.

The strategic difference is visibility without traffic. A well-optimized answer might get cited thousands of times in ChatGPT conversations or Google AI Overviews without generating a single session in your analytics. This challenges traditional attribution models but extends your brand's reach into entirely new contexts where buying decisions increasingly begin.

In short: SEO gets traffic. AEO owns the answer.

Read: The essential SEO tutorial for thriving in the age of AI-driven search

Why Answer Engine Optimization Matters Now More Than Ever

The internet is shifting from a click-based economy to an answer-based one, and your brand can easily get overlooked if you ignore AEO. Don’t believe me?

Google reports that nearly 60% of searches now end without a click as users get what they need directly from AI Overviews, featured snippets, or knowledge panels. On top of that, generative AI is appearing on most major tech platforms (i.e., Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity, and Gemini), and voice assistants answer queries in seconds, often citing a single source.

ChatGPT alone nearly doubled its weekly average users to 800 million from February to August this year, so clearly, this trend is not slowing down.

Brand visibility now depends on being cited and summarized by these systems, not just ranking well in search. But note: That does not mean you can neglect SEO.

AI engine optimization actually complements SEO and inbound marketing; it doesn't replace them. AEO draws on many SEO foundations — strong content, domain credibility, internal linking — but reorients priorities so that content is machine-friendly, structured, and ready to be quoted or excerpted.

While traditional SEO remains essential for driving traffic, AEO determines whether your brand appears in the most important answers. So, think of it as a new layer to your existing content strategy, not a separate thing competing for resources.

Best Practices for Answer Engine Optimization

Effective AEO means work across your content production process. Each practice below includes specific workflows, clear ownership, and actionable checklists to help your team execute with confidence.

1. Focus on questions and user intent.

AEO is extremely question and answer-focused.

So, start by building a question inventory that captures what your audience typically asks at every stage of their journey.

Connect with sales and customer service to understand the questions prospects and customers frequently ask. Then, mine Google‘s “People Also Ask” (PAA) boxes for your core topics. These reveal what users want answered and what Google’s algorithm considers relevant.

Once collected, audit your existing content to identify gaps or opportunities to update content to answer these questions. Also, research them in both search engines and AI tools to see how your competitors are currently performing for them.

From there, segment questions by funnel stage and buyer persona. Here are some general guidelines you can follow:

• Awareness-stage questions need educational, jargon-free answers.
• Consideration-stage questions require comparisons, frameworks, and proof points.
• Decision-stage questions demand specifics about implementation, pricing, and support.

Pro tip: Track this inventory in a shared spreadsheet or your CRM, noting which questions you've covered, which are in progress, and which represent content gaps your competitors might be filling first.

2. Structure content for direct answers and extractions.

When you search Google, its AI doesn't read your entire article linearly. Instead, it identifies answer-like structures (short paragraphs after questions, numbered steps, comparison tables) and decides if that content directly addresses a user’s query.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT do something similar during training and retrieval, prioritizing content that presents information in clear, modular blocks that they can confidently cite.

To optimize for this behavior, lead every key section with a 40-60-word direct answer that fully addresses the question, similar to how you would typically go after “featured snippets” in Google (more on that later).

If someone asks, “What is inbound marketing?” define it in two or three sentences in your first paragraph — no fluff, preamble, or quips (as much as this one pains me), just the answer. Follow that with supporting detail, examples, and context for readers wanting depth.

Also, use scannable formatting like bullet points, numbered lists, and tables, and keep paragraphs under four sentences when possible. This isn‘t about dumbing down your content; it’s about making valuable information accessible to both busy readers and skimming algorithms.

If you have the resources, adopt reusable content block patterns that answer engines recognize. Think definition blocks for terminology, step-by-step blocks for processes, pros-and-cons blocks for evaluations, and example blocks for illustration.

Here’s an example of a definition box from one of my HubSpot articles on organic marketing:

Source

These patterns act as semantic signals that help AI identify what type of information you're providing and how to extract it accurately.

Pro tip: Content Hub can help you templatize these patterns, streamline content briefs, and maintain editorial governance at scale as your team produces more AEO-optimized content. So can schema.

3. Use schema to call out information to answer engines.

Schema markup is structured data you add to your HTML to explicitly tell search engines and AI systems what your content represents.

It's the difference between Google guessing that your page is a how-to guide and Google knowing with certainty that it is, with five specific steps, an estimated completion time, and required tools.

Focus on these core schema types for AEO impact:

• Use FAQPage schema on pages with question-and-answer pairs. This helps Google surface your content in rich results and gives LLMs clear question-answer associations to extract.
• Apply HowTo schema to instructional content, marking each step, its position in the sequence, and any images or warnings.
• Tag editorial content with Article schema, including headline, publish date, author, and organization. This establishes freshness and authority signals.
• Add Speakable schema to key sections you want voice assistants to prioritize when reading answers aloud.
• Finally, implement Organization schema sitewide to clarify your brand identity, logo, and social profiles for consistent entity recognition.

CMS SEO tools in platforms like HubSpot let you templatize schema across content types so your team doesn't hand-code for every post. If you’re a HubSpot user, set up templates for your most common content types— blog posts, guides, FAQs, and product pages — and the schema will be applied automatically with clean, crawlable HTML.

4. Get into featured snippets and “People Also Ask.”

Featured snippets and “People Also Ask” boxes are Google‘s most visible answer formats, and they serve as training data for how AI Overviews select and present information.

When your content appears in a featured snippet, you've essentially been pre-selected by Google as the authoritative answer, which definitely increases your chances of being cited by AI summaries and language models that crawl the web.

To win featured snippets, keep these guidelines in mind when creating content:

• Format your answers to match the snippet type in Google. If the existing snippet is a numbered list, structure your answer as a numbered list. If it‘s a paragraph, lead with a concise paragraph answer. If it’s a table, present your information in a comparison table with clear rows and columns.
• Mirror the question wording in your H2 or H3 header. If the PAA question is “How do you calculate ROI?”, your header should match that phrasing exactly.
• Place your answer high on the page. Ideally, this is within the first two scrolls. Google prioritizes content that's easily accessible and clearly structured.
• Use the inverted pyramid approach: answer first, then provide context, examples, and related information for users who want to go deeper.

Pro tip: To systematically capture more features, harvest “People Also Ask” questions for your target topics every quarter. Open an incognito browser, search your core keywords, and document every PAA question that appears. Note which ones you already answer well, which you answer poorly, and which you don't address at all.

Prioritize updating existing high-authority pages to target new PAA questions rather than creating new content. Google favors established pages for featured snippets, so enhancing what already ranks often delivers faster results.

5. Prioritize credibility.

Recent research shows that content including citations, quotes, and statistics is 30-40% more visible in AI search results. This emphasizes the importance of backing up claims with credible sources and maintaining high editorial standards. That said, strengthen your content by:

• Format your content for easy skimming. Think bullet points, schema, etc.
• Supporting all claims with facts. Including data-driven insights and expert citations to increase trustworthiness and demonstrate expertise. (Even better if it’s original data or research.)
• Use trusted resources. Leverage authoritative publications that AI models favor while maintaining originality in your analysis.
• Update existing content regularly with new data and insights. This maintains relevance and helps already-ranking pages stay on top.

6. Build a strong, positive online presence across multiple channels.

Social proof works. I mean, it’s marketing 101. The more people rave about something or buy it, the more others are likely to believe it’s true. AI and LLMs work similarly. They learn what to trust based on which sources appear frequently across authoritative contexts.

In other words, LLMs are more likely to treat your content as credible and worth citing if your brand is cited in reputable industry publications, discussed in high-quality forums, and referenced in academic or government sources.

Off-site authority isn't just about backlinks for SEO, however. It’s about establishing proof that your brand is a legitimate subject-matter expert across many different online territories. Think other publications, forums, review sites, and social media platforms.

Knowing this, you want to develop a multichannel distribution strategy that prioritizes platforms where your audience and AI training data intersect. This could mean:

• Publishing thought leadership on LinkedIn. As a professional platform, this will help you reach others in your industry and establish executive visibility.
• Creating educational video content for YouTube. Video transcripts are crawled by AI systems and often more detailed than blog posts.
• Participating authentically in relevant Reddit communities and Quora discussions. These platforms are increasingly cited by AI as sources of real user sentiment and practical advice.
• Pitch byline articles to industry publications with strong editorial standards. These third-party endorsements signal authority far more than content published exclusively on your domain or smaller publications.
• Creating original research and data visualizations. When you publish a survey, benchmark report, or data-driven insight, create link-worthy assets that get cited across the web. Each citation reinforces your authority and increases the likelihood that AI models surface your data when answering related questions.
• Establishing a distribution cadence and repurposing workflow. A single piece of research can become a LinkedIn post, a YouTube video, a contributed article, a Reddit discussion, and a Quora answer, each tailored to the platform and audience.
• Assigning a content distribution owner. This person will be responsible for adapting core assets and tracking where they're shared. Include PR angles and thought leadership opportunities in your planning; speaking engagements, podcast interviews, and media mentions all contribute to the authority signals that LLMs evaluate.

Multi-channel diversification is built into the Loop Marketing playbook in the Amplify stage. Learn more about it here.

Pro tip: Content Remix can help you with this repurposing in one click.

Plus, Marketing Hub automation can help orchestrate this distribution at scale, scheduling cross-platform posts, tracking engagement, and measuring which channels drive the most authority signals and referral traffic back to your owned content.

7. Optimize for voice search.

Voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant choose answers differently from visual search results and LLMs.

They need concise, factually unambiguous, and structured content that can be spoken aloud in 15-30 seconds and is formatted for natural language comprehension.

When someone asks their smart speaker a question, the assistant typically cites one, single source. You want that to be yours. Here’s how you can do that:

• Write answers in spoken-friendly language. Avoid jargon, long dependent clauses, and ambiguous pronouns. A voice assistant reading “It enables seamless integration” out loud leaves the listener confused about what “it” refers to. Instead, repeat the subject: “HubSpot's API enables seamless integration.”
• Use Speakable schema markup. This tells assistants, “This paragraph is concise, self-contained, and ready to be read aloud.”
• Test voice queries on Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant to audit your visibility.
• Create a naming convention for voice-optimized content blocks in your CMS. Label FAQs, definitions, and key takeaways with Speakable markup. This helps your team knows which sections have been voice-optimized.

Read: "How and Why to Optimize Your Website for Voice Search"

8. Learn into localization for voice.

Local businesses face a unique AEO challenge: queries that seem non-local often surface local entities in AI-generated answers.

For example, when someone asks “best coffee shop for remote work,” Google AI Overviews and voice assistants frequently respond with specific nearby options, pulling data from Google Business Profile and local landing pages.

You're invisible in these high-intent moments if your local data is incomplete or inconsistent.

Cover your bases by:

• Optimizing your Google Business Profile. This means you need to verify your business name, address, and phone number match your website exactly. Add complete business hours, including holidays and special events. Upload high-quality photos of your location, products, and team. Select all relevant categories. Google uses these to match your business to voice queries. Write a keyword-rich business description that includes the services and questions your customers actually search for.
• Building a strategy for getting reviews. Ask satisfied customers to leave Google reviews, and respond promptly to every review — positive or negative. Review volume and recency are strong ranking signals for local AI results, and LLMs sometimes cite review themes when recommending businesses.
• Create local landing pages for each service area. This was one of the first strategies I saw big wins from for a client years ago, and it is still effective. Even if you're a single-location business, dedicated pages for “marketing consulting in Austin” or “HVAC repair in Brooklyn” give AI systems clear geographic and service signals to extract. Use consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) formatting across all pages.
• Ensure your local business data is accurate and consistent across sources. This means on major platforms like Google Business Profile, Apple Maps, Bing Places, your website, and even Mapquest (Yes, they’re still around!). Voice queries like “What time does [business name] close?” or “Is [business name] open today?” pull from structured sources. Inconsistent data confuses customers as well as AI systems and dilutes your local authority. With this in mind, set a quarterly audit schedule to check and update this information as your business evolves.

Source

How does Loop Marketing fit into AEO?

Loop marketing and AI engine optimization are natural partners in a modern content strategy. Traditional funnel marketing assumes buyers take a linear path from awareness to purchase, interacting in the same places, asking the same questions, and visiting the same pages.

But today‘s buyers don’t move in straight lines, and they certainly don’t all take the same journey.

Loop marketing recognizes this reality by designing for continuous engagement across multiple channels, rather than one-time conversion in one specific place.

You create content that serves customers before, during, and after the sale. Answering new questions as they arise, supporting expanded use cases, and nurturing advocacy that feeds back into awareness. You meet them on social media, forums, podcasts, through AI assistants, and a host of other platforms.

When a satisfied customer asks ChatGPT, “How do I get more value from my marketing automation?” and your knowledge base article gets cited, you've stayed top-of-mind without waiting for them to remember your domain and navigate there manually.

When prospects loop back to compare options and Google AI Overviews summarizes your competitor comparison guide, you've re-entered their consideration set.

When new users ask voice assistants about getting started and your onboarding content gets recommended, you‘ve scaled customer success beyond your support team’s capacity.

AEO is a crucial part of loop marketing and meeting modern buyers where they are.

Technical AEO Checklist

Like SEO, AEO also involves the technical setup and performance of your website and content. That said, having some code knowledge or working with a developer on some points on this checklist is good.

These tasks will ensure that answer engines can crawl, parse, and extract your content reliably. It’s baseline work that must be in place before advanced AEO tactics deliver results.

Verify server-side rendering for all critical content.

If your answers, headings, or critical text load only via JavaScript (JS), many crawlers won't see them. Ensure your HTML contains actual content when the page first loads, not just empty divs waiting for JS to populate them.

Use proper semantic HTML tags (headings, lists, sections).

Mark headings with proper H1, H2, and H3 tags in logical hierarchy. Use