By Katie Ibberson, SEO Executive at Dialled In

If you have a keen eye on the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing; you might have spotted a new contender on the horizon. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), or GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), represents the next stepping stone from traditional SEO. This new era of AEO marketing focusses on delivering ready-made and direct answers to users over the self-service approach of the traditional listed search engine results (SERPs).

To learn more about the nuances between SEO and AEO (or GEO), check out our recent ‘AEO vs SEO in Digital Marketing‘ quick guide.

To read more about the fundamental differences between the familiar SEO and growing AEO, read our recent ‘AEO Marketing Fundamentals: An AEO Starter Guide’.

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Understand the rising trend of AEO in 2026

The generation of AEO marketing can be traced back to several user behaviours and technology developments over the past few years. These include:

1. Rise of voice search:

Chances are, you either use or know someone who uses voice search regularly. Whether it is a quick ‘Alexa, find me the nearest Italian restaurant near me…’ or ‘Gemini, what is the weather report for tomorrow?’, we have all come to rely on the convenience and speed of voice search in the past years.

Voice search relies on AI assisted technology to read websites and select the most compatible information within seconds. Taking this into consideration, your site needs to be prepared with well-structured content, clear schema markup, natural language, and local SEO for those ‘near me’ voice searches.

If this is a user behaviour you are interested in, it is also interesting how game-changing the rise in voice search technology has been for accessibility and inclusion. Ensuring that your site is properly optimised for voice search is important to ensure your content is accessible for more users.

2. Launch of public facing AI chat platforms:

Since OpenAI’s launch of one of the most known public LLMs, ChatGPT in 2022, there has been a snowball effect on how users search and interact with AI online. As of September 2025, Open AI published research that revealed that ChatGPT saw an average of 2.5 billion searches each day, 24% of which are categorised as informational queries. That is 600 million users using ChatGPT alone to find information, brands and companies each day!

With those kinds of statistics, there is no room for doubt that all marketeers in 2026 should be prioritising a share of strategy to understanding where their business can gain visibility and traffic from this space.

3. The rise of zero-click searches:

There are many big statements circulating SEO and digital marketing spaces proclaiming the ‘end of the click’ and ‘death of the 10 blue links’ in response to a very fundamental shift in how users are being served information online. Search engines like Google are already moving away from traditional SERP formats, and towards an AI-first mentality where search engines are being asked to present answers, not options.

This is one of the most prevalent ways that business’s SEO strategy is being asked to transform and evolve with the introduction of AEO’s Answer Engine Optimisation fundamentals.

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Getting Started: AEO Guide to Get You Started in 2026

1. User intent knowledge

Before getting technical, or even putting digital pen to paper, of one the very first questions you must ask is ‘do I understand my user’s needs?’. AEO in 2026 is intently user experience focussed. Its primary job is to deliver the best answer, as quickly as possible. Start your AEO journey by building an inventory of search queries and questions. These questions will create your content building blocks and should reflect the customer needs that you want to be known for.

Analyse searches that you are already ranking highly for and take note of the related queries featured in the ‘People Also Ask’ features in the SERP. This will give you a strong indication of what topics your site is already registering authority in.

Once you have collected your data, focus on identifying the gaps in your visibility. What content is missing from your site? What content is not getting the visibility you need? This is your opportunity to research these topics and assess what content customers are really looking to gain those important citations and mentions in AI-generated results.

2. Making your site LLM site crawler friendly

So, if your site is already up and running, you have likely already heard of site or search engine crawlers. For AEO, the idea is quite simple: you want your content to be easily navigable for AI crawlers to gather the right information for their users.

AI site crawlers have limited capacity for reading content through programming such as JavaScript and are restricted to HTML formats. Because of this, implementing a LLMs.text file into the root directory of your site provides a clear, structured format that breaks down core content to a more accessible format, opening your site up to more potential visibility and referral traffic through AI.

3. Structured data

Beyond LLMs.text files, there are lots of ways to make your site as readable for AI crawlers as possible, such as considering your use of structured data. Consider points such as:

• Header tags: Using a clear structure of header tags to highlight prominent topics and important information of the page.

(Top tip: Have you noticed the difference between how people search and speak? Aligning your headings with more natural language searches can align better with AI search trends)

• Image Alt text: Ensuring Alt text is always provided on any images or media provides context of its relevance or importance for AI search engines
• Schema markup: Schema markup can allow you to highlight important information. For example, the telephone number or address of your business can be built into schema markup on the website for localised AI searches
• Breadcrumb structured data: Including breadcrumbs in your site can help AI engine crawlers understand the relationship between your pages

4. Optimise for answer-first content

When writing your online content for AEO, prioritise choices that can be easily parsed and understood by both humans and machines. This means cracking some basics of ready-to-serve content, including a few top tips, such as:

• Aim to use clear and jargon free language in answer-first content.
• Keep sentences and paragraphs short and concise. Consider how good old-fashioned ‘Featured Snippets’ would be approached in SEO.
• Use formatting features that are easily ‘digestible’, such as bullet points, numbered lists, and tables.
• Consider applying a FAQ section to key lading pages that directly pair a common search query with a direct and summarised response.

5. Consider technical

There are several more technical considerations to keep in mind to best place your business for AEO success. At its heart, like the fundamentals of SEO, AEO relies heavily on your content being discoverable and up-to date. Some technical errors that could hold your site back for AEO potential include:

• Misused crawl budget: If your site has a large amount of redirected or Error 404 pages, this may be eating up a large portion on your weekly crawl budget, pulling resources away from your most valuable pages. By minimising technical errors and redirects on your site, AI search engines can much more efficiently browse your site, pulling the best information for your future customers.
• Slow page speed: Have you ever made a search on the go and abandoned that first website because it was just taking too long to load? In general, we are a busy generation, used to having information at our fingertips 24 hours a day – and AI programmes are no different! Increasing your page speed can not only improve overall user experience and help site crawlers retrieve information for AI search quicker for real-time answers.

6. Off-site authority building strategies

As you have likely gathered, AEO is all about speed and authority. Not only do these platforms need to provide answer-ready content within seconds, but it also needs to know that it is reliable, trustworthy and authoritative – and this is where link building comes in!

Link building for AEO serves as external validation of a site’s trustworthiness. Think of it as getting a recommendation of a product from a friend, the more people recommend a product – the more likely you may be to trust the quality of that product and make the purchase. In a similar way, the more reputable links there are to your site, the more recognition and trust it builds to be featured in AI-generated results.

Whilst we are discussing the joys of link building for your future AEO success, it is also important that we consider the ‘how’ to the links featured on your site, especially in defining anchor text. The anchor text hosting the link to your site also carries its share of importance in signalling to search engine crawlers the nature of your site. By including key topical phrases that clearly describe the nature of the link can help signal its relevance and authority on the topic searched. This link building strategy is all about being part of the wider conversation, to one day start leading that discussion as the authority.

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So, are you ready to dominate the AEO marketing space? Take this AEO Guide and get started on generating reliable and accessible content with these strategies today. Or, to understand more about how our SEO services could support your business, click here.

At Dialled In, we help businesses like yours build strong, sustainable backlink strategies that work, combining great content with outreach that gets results.

If you’re ready to get your website seen by more of the right people, let’s get you dialled in.


Contact us today to chat about how we can help grow your online visibility and authority.