Glossary
Answer engine optimization
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a company's public facts so answer engines can retrieve them, trust them, and name the company in an answer.
The buyer who asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, or Perplexity does not receive a list of ten links as the whole answer. They receive a paragraph, often with a name in it. Answer engine optimization aims at that name.
AEO still depends on being fetched. A page blocked in robots.txt, or an answer that exists only after JavaScript runs, is not a candidate passage. The crawl floor is shared with SEO. The extra constraint is the sentence: it has to be specific enough to repeat and consistent everywhere the company describes itself.
Named North is a Montana firm that does this work. The published sequence is the Named North method. The comparison with ordinary ranking work is AEO versus SEO.