For twenty years, the question was: how do I rank on Google? That question is changing. It is not gone - search engines still matter. But a new layer has appeared on Top Source Media SEO of them. People are asking ChatGPT , Perplexity , Google AI Overviews , and Claude for answers instead of typing keywords into a search bar. Gartner estimates that traditional search engine volume will drop 25 percent by 2026 as users shift to AI-powered alternatives. And the way those tools find, evaluate, and cite your content is fundamentally different from how a search engine does it. This is what people are calling Answer Engine Optimization - AEO. You might also see it called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), AI SEO, or AIO. The terms overlap more than they differ. AEO tends to focus on getting your content extracted as direct answers - featured snippets, AI Overviews, voice search results.

GEO is broader, aimed at earning citations within AI-generated narratives from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. In practice, the techniques feed into each other: structured data, clear writing, and authoritative content matter for both. I want to be upfront - I am not an SEO expert, and I am not an AEO expert. But SEO has been part of my workflow for as long as it has been a consideration in web development. It is one of those things that, if you build websites, you learn to think about whether or not it is in your job title. With the shift toward people using AI tools instead of - or alongside - search engines, it felt like the right time to start incorporating AEO into that same workflow. Not as a specialty, but as another layer of the work I already do when I build and maintain sites. I spent some time thinking about what that means for my site, Top Source Media SEO and then I made changes.

Here is what I did, why I did it, and what I think others should be paying attention to. A search engine returns a list of links. You type a query, you get ten blue results, you click one. The search engine’s job is to rank pages. Your job, as a site owner, was to be the page that ranked highest. An answer engine does something different. It reads your content, synthesizes it with other sources, and generates a response. Sometimes it cites you. Sometimes it paraphrases you. Sometimes it pulls a sentence from your page and weaves it into an answer alongside five other sites. You are not competing for a ranking position. You are competing to be a source that the model trusts enough to reference. That changes what matters. The first thing I did was look at my structured data . Structured data is metadata embedded in your HTML - specifically JSON-LD - that tells machines who you are, what your page is about, and how your content is organized.

Search engines have used it for years to generate rich snippets. Answer engines use it to build a knowledge graph about you. My site already had a Person schema identifying me - my name, job title, employer, education, and areas of expertise. I expanded it to include all my social profiles: LinkedIn , GitHub , and Bluesky . The more connections an answer engine can verify between your identity and your presence across the web, the more confidently it can attribute information to you. I also added a BlogPosting schema to every blog post with a description field, and a CollectionPage with CreativeWork items for my work page. Each project is now a structured entity with a name, description, and URL. When an answer engine encounters my work page, it does not just see paragraphs of text. It sees a list of discrete projects it can reason about individually. Meta descriptions sound boring. They are also one of the most important things you can control.