Answer Engine Optimization for Brands: A Plain Guide From 2025-2026 Research

Answer engine optimization (AEO) means getting your brand named inside an answer from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, or Copilot. The customer does not get a list of links to click. They get a short reply that already names a few options. If your name is not in that reply, you were not part of that conversation.

We read four research papers from 2025 and 2026. This briefing explains them for a marketing lead or a founder, without the heavy technical sections. It is our summary of that research. It is not our own lab study, and it is not a promise that one change will put you in every answer.

What changed when assistants started helping people shop

On 28 April 2025, OpenAI added shopping inside ChatGPT. A person can ask for something simple, such as the best wireless headphones under a set budget, and get products with photos, prices, reviews, and links to shops. Kateryna Pohorelova, in a university journal article, treats that launch as a clear sign of change. Old search gave you a list of links. An assistant now gives you a recommendation.

Her definition is practical. Answer engine optimization means improving your text, your site structure, your reputation, and your brand facts so an AI chat tool includes you when someone asks a real question. She is clear on one limit. You cannot buy that place the way you buy an ad. The model chooses. Text that sounds like a hard sell is less likely to be reused than a page that answers the question in simple words.

She also notes who this helps. A smaller brand can be included if the facts are correct and the page is easy to read. Budget still matters for ads. It matters less for being named, as long as the model can find one consistent story about you.

Pohorelova cites a July 2024 Statista report: ChatGPT held 43.1% of AI-search traffic and Gemini held 35.3%. Together that is more than 78%. Perplexity had 12.8% and Bing had 3.2%. For most household and retail buyers, those two assistants are where questions already start.

For a shop, a clinic, or a brand that sells to families, start measurement on ChatGPT and Gemini before you add every other assistant. Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and much of Perplexity use inside companies. Test them when your buyer is a company, not when your buyer is comparing a product, a local service, or a price.

Every question you send is processed in a data center. A routine you can keep long term is smaller: start with ChatGPT and Gemini because more than three quarters of this traffic was there in mid-2024. Add Claude, Copilot, or Perplexity when you know your buyer actually uses them.

Three types of work that people often mix up

Santhosh Kumar Iyappan, in a 2026 paper, separates three ways a page can be found. We keep his labels because the industry uses them.

| Type | What the customer sees | What your page must do | | --- | --- | --- | | SEO (search engine optimization) | A ranked list of links | Let search engines read the page. Be clear and trusted enough to appear on the list | | AEO (answer engine optimization) | One direct answer, for example a short box at the top of Google or a spoken reply | Give the answer in short sentences that a system can copy | | GEO (generative engine optimization) | A full answer written by AI that mixes several sources | Give a clear picture of your brand, with the same facts on the page and across the web |

Iyappan argues that repeating one keyword many times, by itself, is a weak signal when the system writes an answer. Deep content on the topic, facts with sources, and a clear brand identity link more often to being included. He still treats classic SEO as the base. If Google cannot load your page, an assistant is less likely to use it.

In Iyappan's sample of 100 question-and-answer pairs, keyword-led articles were cited about 41% of the time. Pages with a clear brand picture were cited about 89% of the time. FAQ-style pages were near 67%. Treat those figures as direction, not a guarantee in a sales deck.

Being named is not the same as being described correctly

Pohorelova describes a failure that matters more than a missing mention. A journalist found ChatGPT shopping talking about a Nintendo Switch 2 preorder in real shops before that console was sold that way. OpenAI later connected more retailer data feeds so prices and stock would stay current. If your price, your city, or your product line is wrong on the page, the assistant can repeat the error as if it were true.

Gabriela Marco, in a February 2026 working paper for Exista, lists four things a good check should score. Was the brand mentioned? Was it cited as a source? Were the facts accurate? Was the tone positive, neutral, or negative? We agree with the idea. A score that only counts "your name appeared" can look good when the price or product is wrong.

She also reports a language gap from Exista's own B2B study. Across 25 Latin American firms, English questions showed about a 25 percent visibility advantage over Spanish, and only 7 of the 25 firms did well in both. If you sell in more than one language, ask the same buyer questions in each language.

Local and specialist businesses are not all the same

Aadam Quraishi and Fatimah Quraishi studied local-service questions in a large public set of chatbot logs (WildChat). About 10 percent of those conversations were people looking for a local provider. Legal questions were the largest share, then medical, then auto and roofing. Location appeared in about 69 percent of roofing questions and about 34 percent of legal questions.

Their score for local citation uses six factors: how deep the content is, who else cites you, review tone, licenses and certificates, local detail, and how up to date the information is. The importance of each factor changes by industry. Medical and legal depend more on citations and credentials. Home services and HVAC depend more on reviews and location.

The same paper points to the Princeton GEO study (Aggarwal and colleagues, 2024). Adding links to trusted sources raised the chance of being selected by roughly 40 percent in that work, with a bigger gain for sites that were not already famous. Statistics and quotes were among the stronger edits. Repeating the same keyword too often was not.

What a non-technical team can change this month

These steps follow Pohorelova's principles, shortened so a founder can assign them.

1. Let the assistants read the site. If your robots.txt file blocks the bots that load pages for answers, you have blocked yourself. Pohorelova names bot access as the first technical step.

2. Answer the question in the first lines. Write the page the way a customer asks. "Which payroll tool fits a 40-person company in Texas?" is better than a headline that only says "innovative payroll solutions."

3. Keep one set of facts. Price, city, category, and what you do not offer should match on the page, in your FAQ, and in any structured data (schema).

4. Update information that goes out of date. Stock, fees, and opening hours change. A page from 2023 that still describes last year's offer is a problem once an assistant quotes it.

5. Sound useful, not like an ad. Models give more room to neutral explanations than to text that pushes a purchase.

6. Earn mentions you do not control. Reviews, trade press, and directories are part of the story the model sees.

7. Translate properly. If you serve two languages, translate the full answer, not only the menu or the title.

8. Check the answer, then check again. Run the questions your buyers ask on ChatGPT and Gemini first. Write down whether you were named and whether the facts were right. Change the page. Ask the same questions again.

What we would not do this quarter

Trying to improve keyword density alone. Iyappan rates it as a weak link to AI retrieval.

Trying to buy your way into the answer. Pohorelova's point is that the selection step is not an ad slot.

Using one checklist for every industry. A clinic and a roofing company need trust for different reasons.

Blocking answer-engine bots and then asking why you are missing from answers.

One name confusion: "AEO" also means Authorised Economic Operator, a customs program. A 2025 paper with that title is about South African trade compliance. It will not help a brand get into ChatGPT.

Where this leaves a brand team

The papers agree on a simple test. If a careful person read only your page, would they name you for this question and get the facts right? If the page is vague, out of date, or written like an ad, the assistant has little to repeat. If the page answers the question, cites real sources, and matches the rest of the web, you have given it something safe to say.

At AskLLM we run that test on the assistants your customer actually uses. Start with a free audit on ChatGPT and Gemini. See also GEO vs SEO and the AEO glossary entry. A missing mention, a wrong fact, and an out-of-date offer are three different problems. The research above is why we separate them.

References

Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K., and Deshpande, A. (2024). GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. arXiv:2311.09735. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735

Iyappan, S. K. (2026). From keywords to intelligence: A comparative framework analysis of SEO, AEO, and GEO in AI-driven digital ecosystems. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20362080

Marco, G. (2026). Beyond AEO: The AI visibility stack and the era of agent discovery optimization. Exista.io working paper, February 2026.

Pohorelova, K. A. (2025). From SEO to AEO: How ChatGPT shopping is transforming marketing in 2025. https://doi.org/10.33216/1998-7927-2025-292-6-119-128

Quraishi, A., and Quraishi, F. VS-AEO: A vertical-specific answer engine optimization framework for local business visibility in large language model responses. AIAEO Research Institute.

Disclaimer: Research synthesis for marketing leaders. Not legal or medical advice. Assistant behavior varies by region and model version.