AI Chatbot Glossary
What Is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so that answer engines, including AI assistants, voice assistants, and search features like featured snippets, can extract and present it as a direct answer to a question.
Definition
AEO focuses on the question-and-answer shape of content: a clear question as a heading, a concise self-contained answer in the first sentence or two, followed by supporting detail. It leans on structured data (FAQPage, HowTo, Product, DefinedTerm), clean page structure, and factual precision, because answer engines quote rather than rank. Where classic SEO competes for a position on a results page, AEO competes to be the sentence an assistant reads out or the source it cites. The term predates large language models (it grew out of voice search and featured snippets) and now overlaps heavily with generative engine optimization.
Why Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Matters for AI Chatbots
A growing share of "which product should I buy" and "does this store ship to X" questions are answered by an assistant before the shopper visits any site. Content written as direct answers is what gets pulled in. For a store, that means policy pages, FAQs, and product pages that state facts plainly. Chatonbo helps in two ways: its knowledge coverage report shows the real questions visitors ask that your content does not answer yet, and its widget publishes structured data for the assistant's answers so crawlers can read them.
See it in practice:
Find the questions your site does not answerRelated Terms
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a website's content more likely to be used, cited, and recommended by generative AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text Markdown file placed at the root of a website (for example, example.com/llms.txt) that gives large language models a concise, curated summary of the site and links to its most important pages.
FAQ Bot
An FAQ bot is a chatbot designed specifically to answer frequently asked questions by pulling answers from a pre-built knowledge base.
Knowledge Base
A knowledge base is a structured collection of information (documents, FAQs, policies) that a chatbot uses to find accurate answers - searched in real time to ground responses.