Answer engine optimization, often shortened to AEO, is the work of shaping your website so AI assistants and answer engines can read it, understand it, and quote it accurately. It is the AI-era companion to SEO: where SEO aims at ranking in a list of links, AEO aims at being the source an AI answer is built from.
For a small business, this is the new front door. When a customer asks an assistant for a recommendation, the reply leans on sites that state plainly what they do, who they serve, and where. A page that reads clearly to a person and to a machine is eligible to be part of that answer. A vague or unreadable one is skipped.
In practice, AEO overlaps heavily with the technical groundwork: structured facts about your services and hours, a clean text copy an assistant can read without guessing, crawlers welcomed by name, and real speed underneath.
The honest limit is worth repeating: this makes your site readable and eligible, it does not buy you a recommendation. An assistant can only recommend a business it can read in the first place, so readable is where it starts. Every site I build includes this groundwork. See what a full build covers.