Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of making your brand visible and citable inside AI generated answers, not just search engine results pages.
This is where we break down the core concepts: what counts as a citation versus a mention, what an entity is in AI search, how AEO differs from traditional SEO, and the foundational tactics every B2B SaaS company should understand before investing further.
Start here if you are new to AI visibility and want a clear, practical grounding in the terms and mechanics before moving into research, tactics, or agency selection.
Every page that an engine will cite about you is a holding in a portfolio you never consciously built. Most are concentrated in one place, and that place is usually the riskiest one.
Share of model is how often an engine names you among the options for a question, measured across a fixed prompt set. It is a useful idea wrapped in a term vendors are busy ruining.
One is a photograph taken months ago that you cannot edit. The other is a search running right now that you can influence this week. Knowing which one is answering decides what work is worth doing.
Perplexity searches first and writes from what it finds. ChatGPT answers from memory unless something tells it to search. That single architectural difference explains almost every behavioural difference between them, including which sites get cited.
Retrieval is a funnel that narrows from thousands of candidates to the three passages a model actually quotes. Four stages, each with a different rule, and only two of them respond to anything you control.
Five steps between a question and a company name, and you can be eliminated at any of them. What each step rewards, and and which two actually matter.
A company can be indexed everywhere, retrieved often and still never cited. Three stages, three unrelated causes, and the fixes have almost nothing in common.
Overviews draw on the ordinary index, so eligibility is not the hard part. What separates the brands that get named is mostly what other people publish about them.
Things, not strings. What a knowledge graph holds, why an answer engine consults one before naming anybody, and the difference between the graphs you can read and the ones you cannot.
An entity is a thing a machine can tell apart from every similar name. Your brand starts as a string. The three steps it has to survive to become the other kind of object.
