Glossary
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Optimising content and structured data so that answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews cite the business as a source.
In plain terms
Optimising so that answer engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, cite your business when they answer a question in your field. The target is the citation rather than the click, because increasingly the click does not happen.
It overlaps heavily with ordinary good SEO, with more weight on clarity, structure and verifiable facts, and less on keyword placement.
Why it matters in Kenya
For a Kenyan business the opportunity is specificity. A model answering a question about prices, regulations or payment methods here will reach for a source that states local facts plainly, and very few local sites do.
What to do about it
Four checks you can run on your own site this week.
- Answer the question in the first two sentences, before the background
- Put figures and dates in text, never only inside an image
- Name the author and the date, and say when the page was last reviewed
- Publish something a general model cannot generate: your actual prices or process
More terms
Other words you will meet when commissioning web, e-commerce or search work in Kenya.
- Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)A near-synonym for AEO: structuring a site and its entity so generative AI search systems retrieve and attribute its content.
- Schema GraphA set of Schema.org structured-data blocks connected by @id references so that every page's markup resolves back to one Organization entity (Architecture Section 11).
- NAPName, Address, Phone number.
