Answer engine optimization

What it means in practice

Commonly abbreviated AEO. The tactics claimed for it overlap heavily with established SEO work: clear structure, direct answers near the top, primary sources, and content an engine can extract a clean claim from. The honest caveat is that no engine publishes its selection criteria, so causal claims in this field are inference rather than fact. refd measures whether appearance changed; it does not perform optimization, and treats any tactic's effect as a hypothesis to be tested against repeated runs.

How refd treats it

This is category vocabulary, not a refd metric. refd measures what AI answers actually said across repeated runs, and publishes the raw answer behind every number. Where a term above carries a claim about what causes visibility, refd treats that claim as a hypothesis to test rather than a setting to configure.

This definition is editorial. It describes how the term is used across the field rather than something the software computes, so unlike the metric pages it is not generated from the product.