Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Course by Ahrefs: What is AEO?

Hey everyone, my name is Samo and welcome to the answer engine optimization or AEO course by HRS. In this course, I'll be teaching you how to get traffic from AI search and to get more brand visibility in it. This course will have a heavy focus on execution. And while the topic might be new to many of you, I don't want you to feel intimidated, especially if you have a background in SEO because SEO is the foundation of AEO. Now, here's why you need to pay attention to this right now. As of December 2025, the presence of an AI overview on Google reduces the click-through rate for the number one ranking page by 58%. That means for every 100 clicks you used to get, Google now keeps 58 of them. Chat GPT alone has 900 million weekly users. It handles roughly 12% of Google search volume. And AI traffic to websites has grown 9.7 times in the past year. So, you can either ignore the shift and watch your traffic shrink while raising your fist at the clouds, or you can learn how it works and capitalize on it. Because here's the thing most people miss. In June 2025, AI search accounted for just 0.5% of our traffic, but it drove 12.1% of our signups. That's a 23 times higher conversion rate than organic search. Search has changed and it's no longer just about clicks because AI traffic is one of the highest converting channels we've ever seen. So, let's start with the basics. In this first lesson, I'm going to explain what AEO actually is, why it matters, and give you a road map for the entire course so you know exactly what's coming. So, what is answer engine optimization? AEO or answer engine optimization is the practice of making your content visible and useful to AI systems that deliver direct answers. That's Google AI overviews, Chat GBT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, basically any platform where AI is generating a response and choosing who to site. You'll also hear this called GEO, generative engine optimization, or LLMO, large language model optimization. They all mean essentially the same thing. So, we'll use AEO throughout this course. Now, you might be wondering, how is this different from traditional SEO? Well, in traditional SEO, you optimize web pages to rank higher in a list of search results. You're competing for positions. The user sees your blue link, clicks it, and lands on your site. In AEO, there is no list. The AI reads from dozens of sources, synthesizes an answer, and decides who to mention or site. You're not competing for a position, you're competing for a mention. And the rules for getting mentioned are a bit different from the rules for ranking in organic blue link results. Now, we'll break down exactly how that works in module one. But for now, the key thing to understand is this. AEO doesn't replace SEO. It builds on top of it. Think of SEO as your foundation and AEO as futureproofing your online presence. The fundamentals still matter. quality content, authority, technical health, but the strategy needs to evolve because the way people find information is changing. Now, I know some of you might be thinking, is AI just going to kill SEO completely? And I get it, but this is not the end of SEO. Ethan Smith from Graphite talked about the zero sum bias on HR's podcast. And this is a cognitive bias based on the assumption that if something new goes up, something old must go down. And we saw the exact same thing in 2010 when the app store blew up. Everyone said, "The web is going away. Mobile apps are taking over. Only old people use websites." And yes, mobile apps did blow up. That promise was real. But the web didn't die. It grew alongside these apps. AI search is likely going to be the same story. It is growing fast. Those numbers I just showed you are real. But Google still processes billions of searches per day. Traditional organic traffic still drives massive business value. So, the smart move isn't to panic, it's to play both games. And let me be real with you, most businesses haven't even started thinking about this. We looked at HF's own data and found that our content and product pages have been mentioned 7,470 times across 2,39 pages in AI search without any effort to optimize for it. That's all happening organically because we've been doing solid SEO and creating content that people find useful. Now, imagine what happens when you actually start intentionally optimizing for this. When you know which platforms site what, when you understand how AI decides who to recommend when you're actively building the signals that make AI want to mention your brand. That's exactly what this course will teach you. The course is broken down into four modules plus this introduction. Module one is about how AI search actually works. We'll cover the mechanics, how AI finds content, how it decides what to site, how different platforms like Chat GBT, Google AI overviews, and Perplexity actually differ from each other, and what AI visibility actually looks like for different types of businesses. This is the foundation that makes everything else make sense. Module two is all about strategy. I'll show you the data behind why brand mentions are the single strongest lever for AI visibility, stronger than backlinks, domain rating, or anything else. You'll learn keyword research for AEO, prompt research, and how to figure out where your brand stands versus competitors. Module three is about execution. This is where the actual work happens. How to create content that gets cited, how to earn mentions and citations for other sites, YouTube optimization for AI visibility, which no other course covers, and the technical stuff to make sure AI can actually find and crawl your content. In module four is about measurement. You'll learn how to set up your analytics for AI traffic, how to run competitive audits to find your brand gaps, and how to evaluate whether AEO is actually worth the investment for your business. By the end of the course, you should be able to put together a concrete action plan that's bespoke for your business with workflows to actually do this stuff immediately. All right, so that's the lay of the land. In the next lesson, we're diving straight into how AI search engines actually find and site content, including the concept of query fan out, which is probably the single most important thing to understand about why AI search works the way that it does. I'll see you in the next lesson.