# Answer engine optimization

> The practice of trying to influence whether and how a brand appears in AI-generated answers.

## 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.

## Category

Concept in Optimization practice.
This definition is editorial category vocabulary, not a metric refd computes.