Services
What answer engine optimization is, and how it differs from SEO.
AEO is the discipline; AI search optimization is the service Falkview delivers it as. This page explains what the discipline covers and why it needs different work than SEO.
What it is
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the name for the discipline covering everything that determines whether a system naming companies in a generated answer includes yours. ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Claude are the systems that compose these answers. The term covers three areas of work: entity clarity, content a system can quote, and the third-party sources an answer draws from.
Why it matters
Optimizing for one channel does not automatically optimize for the other. A company can rank at the top of a results page for a query and still go unnamed when a system answers the same question directly, because entity clarity and third-party sources weigh more heavily in that decision than ranking factors do. Treating AEO as a subset of SEO risks leaving exactly the work that decides an AI mention undone.
SEO and AI search are two different jobs.
The same company competes on two different surfaces, and each one rewards something different.
| Traditional search | AI search |
|---|---|
| Rankings | Recommendations |
| Keywords | Questions |
| Search results | Generated answers |
| Clicks | Mentions and citations |
| Pages | Sources |
| Organic visibility | AI visibility |
Falkview works across both.
What we do
- Entity clarity: the record that tells a system who a company is, without ambiguity
- Content a system can quote: a claim stated plainly enough to lift out of context
- The third-party sources an answer draws from, and whether they name you
What we measure
- Whether a system can resolve who your company is without contradiction across sources
- Whether your content appears among the sources an answer cites
- Whether you are named when a system is asked who to consider
What an engagement involves
Falkview delivers AEO through its AI search optimization service. The audit, the fix list and the weekly tracking are described on that service's own page.
Common questions
Questions
- Is AEO the same thing as AI search optimization?
- Yes. AEO is the name for the discipline. AI search optimization is Falkview's name for the delivered service. Both describe the same work.
- Does AEO replace SEO?
- No. Search still drives most discovery, and the pages that rank well are frequently the same pages an AI system draws from when composing an answer. The two remain separate jobs, measured separately.
- Can Falkview guarantee my company gets named in an AI answer?
- No, and nobody can. A generated answer is not something any outside party controls. What can be changed is the material the answer is built from: your entity, your content, and the third-party sources that describe you.
- What is an entity, in this context?
- An entity is the machine-readable record of who your company is and what it does: the identity a system checks before it decides how to describe you, separate from what any single page says.
See what Google and AI already say about you.
We check your visibility across search and the assistants we cover, and show you where you are found, where you are missing, and which sources the answers are built from.