A Guide to Answer Engine Optimisation
Google built its dominance over three decades. AI is now 56% the size of global search – in just 3.5 years.
If that doesn’t make you sit up and rethink your marketing strategy, nothing will.
We are living through one of the most significant shifts in how buyers discover, research, and choose businesses. But many healthcare organisations haven’t caught up yet.
Businesses have been seeing it in the data. Impressions are climbing. Clicks are falling. The gap between those two lines in your analytics is widening.
Businesses are being seen and bypassed at the same time.
What is going on? The “Crocodile Effect” is a shift driven by AI Overviews and zero-click searches.
So, what can be done about this? To start with we should start at the top.
What Is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
AEO is the practice of structuring your content so that AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Perplexity can cite it directly inside their generated responses.
Traditional SEO earns you a ranking position. AEO earns you the answer (the sentence the AI delivers, and the source it credits behind it).
How Does SEO and AEO Work Together?
According to G2’s 2026 AI Search Insight Report, 51% of B2B software buyers now begin their research with an AI chatbot more often than Google, up from just 29% in April 2025.
If your business isn’t showing up in those answers, someone else’s is. And in industries like healthcare and MedTech, where trust is everything that invisibility has compounding consequences.
Is the Blog Dead Or Just Not Optimised To Do The Job Right?
The power of the blog has not diminished. But the way most organisations are using it is lagging well behind what AI needs.
Research analysed by HubSpot across more than 14 million citations found that blogs and listicles account for 62% of AI citations – far ahead of any other page type.
AI is drawn to content that explains, analyses, and contextualises. That’s blog territory.
But in my experience working across healthcare, MedTech and technology businesses, the blog content being produced today hasn’t evolved.
Most organisations are still writing for 2019 Google. And the gaps are obvious once you know what to look for.
What AEO Optimisations Are Missing?
- Author sections
- FAQs
- Schema code
- Headings are statements and not questions
- “Last updated” field
- Table of contents
- Basic SEO foundations – correct heading tag hierarchy, scannable structure, short punchy paragraphs
These are the structural signals AI uses to decide whether your content is worth citing.
Without them, even genuinely useful content may get passed over.
How About Keywords?
The other shift many businesses haven’t made is moving from keywords to context.
A Google search is “best fractional CMO.”
A ChatGPT prompt is more like: “Are there any Fractional CMOs in Australia who specialise in healthcare marketing?”
Generic content won’t match that question.
Specific, persona-driven, use-case content will.
That’s a rewrite of how content strategy works.
"The data I'm seeing tells a clear story - impressions up, clicks down, the crocodile jaw widening. Businesses are being seen and bypassed at the same time."Kelly Dimkovska
What Does AI-Cited Content Look Like?
Structure matters as much as substance. HubSpot’s analysis of thousands of AI-cited URLs reveals consistent patterns across every major engine.
1. Question-based Headings
These show the strongest correlation with citations.
When your page mirrors the structure of the question being asked, the model can extract and reuse that answer easier.
2. FAQ Sections
Pre-package your content in exactly the format AI prefers: question, then answer.
Clean, extractable, citable.
Adding FAQ schema code labels those questions and answers for LLMs.
3. Unique, First-party Data
This is among the most powerful citation signals available.
Business benchmarks, customer outcomes, case studies, these create citable claims that only your brand can source.
Your proprietary data belongs to you alone, and AI will credit it accordingly.
4. Freshness
How fresh your content is matters more than it ever did in traditional SEO.
According to HubSpot’s AEO research, the average age of content cited in major AI engines is 2.9 years – 25% more recent than content ranking on Google.
For ChatGPT specifically, cited content is on average 1.2 years more recent.
A visible “last updated” date on your articles correlates with more citations across nearly all engines.
It’s a simple signal that says: this information is still accurate.
A good strategy is to revisit your articles and publish new updates.
Should LinkedIn And YouTube Be Working Harder For Your Business?
Backlinks
Backlinks which were the dominant currency of SEO for two decades show no meaningful correlation with AI visibility, according to HubSpot’s analysis of their highest-ranking pages.
AI isn’t asking how many sites link to you. It’s asking whether multiple independent sources are saying the same thing.
That consensus tends to come from three places: LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube.
HubSpot’s research found these three platforms account for 55% of citations for product comparison and recommendation queries.
There are structural reasons for this – OpenAI partners with Reddit, Microsoft owns LinkedIn and has invested heavily in OpenAI, and Google owns YouTube.
But it’s also because these platforms are rich with, constantly refreshed, authentic user-generated content.
The problem is that most businesses aren’t using these platforms with AEO intent.
- LinkedIn posts go up without the context or specificity that AI needs to extract and cite them.
- YouTube videos are published without optimised titles, descriptions and transcripts and since AI can’t watch a video, those text elements are the only thing it can ingest.
Content is being created without being structured for discoverability by LLMs.
Ai Generated Content
Following on, there’s also the problem with AI-generated content.
Many businesses are now producing content at scale using AI tools. In principle this is fine but skipping the human review that makes it credible and citable is not.
Google, in particular, is known to deprioritise pure AI-generated content.
The most effective approach is AI-assisted with meaningful human oversight:
- Strong data going in
- Human editing
This ensures expertise is coming out.
Volume without quality is not an AEO strategy.
What Does This Mean Specifically for Healthcare and MedTech?
Healthcare organisations seem to lag behind other industries when it comes to digital marketing. AEO is no exception.
The regulatory environment, long approval chains, and risk-averse culture mean that content strategies often move slowly and structural improvements get deprioritised.
But the stakes in healthcare are arguably higher than anywhere else. AI Overviews now appear on 88% of healthcare-related Google queries, according to BrightEdge data tracked through early 2026.
Patients, referring practitioners, procurement teams and investors are all using AI to research and shortlist.
If your organisation isn’t showing up in those answers with accurate, current, credible content the organisations that are, will shape the conversation before you even enter it.
Can A Fractional CMO Help You Build an AEO Strategy?
AEO isn’t a campaign. It’s a capability that needs to be embedded into your marketing foundations and that is precisely the kind of work a Fractional CMO supports.
It’s the ability to look at your content, your channels, your team’s capability, your data and diagnose where the gaps are and what needs to change first.
In practice, that means starting with a marketing audit to establish your current AI visibility baseline and building your content strategy, restructuring and creating new content with the signals LLMs look for.
Ready To Start Optimising For Answer Engines?
If you want to understand your current AI visibility and build a strategy that reflects the way buyers are searching today, let’s start with a conversation.
FAQs
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO focuses on earning rankings and clicks in traditional search results through keyword targeting, backlinks, and domain authority.
AEO focuses on earning citations and mentions inside AI-generated answers. A page can hold the top organic position on Google and still be entirely absent from the AI overviews.
What is the crocodile effect in marketing?
The crocodile effect is an industry term for what happens when you plot impressions against clicks on the same graph.
As AI Overviews and answer engines serve information directly, impressions continue to rise – your brand is still appearing in search but clicks fall because users are getting their answer without visiting your website.
Does my blog still matter for AEO?
Yes – significantly. Blogs and listicles account for 62% of AI citations, making them one of the most important content types for AI visibility.
The key difference is that your blog needs to be structured for AI, not just optimised for keywords.
That means question-based headings, FAQ sections, short scannable paragraphs, author sections, last updated dates, and content specific enough to match the conversational prompts people are typing into LLMs.
Do backlinks matter for AEO?
Backlinks remain important for traditional SEO rankings, but there doesn’t appear to be a meaningful correlation between backlink profiles and AI citation frequency.
AI engines are optimising for a different outcome – finding the clearest, most credible answer to a question, rather than ranking the most authoritative domain.
This levels the playing field considerably for smaller or newer businesses with strong, well-structured content.
How important is LinkedIn for AEO, and do I need a big following?
LinkedIn is one of the three platforms – alongside Reddit and YouTube that account for 55% of AI citations for product comparison and recommendation queries.
Importantly, there is no observed correlation between audience size and citation frequency.
Content quality and relevance matter far more than follower count. Encouraging your leadership team and subject matter experts to post consistently is one of the most accessible AEO tactics available.
What is a Fractional CMO and how can they help with AEO?
A Fractional CMO is a part-time Chief Marketing Officer who provides marketing leadership without the cost of a full-time hire.
For AEO specifically, a Fractional CMO brings the strategic oversight to audit your current visibility, redesign your content approach, build the right off-site presence – while ensuring everything connects to your broader business goals.
About the Author
Kelly Dimkovska
Founder & Fractional CMO
Kelly has spent over 15 years helping organisations in healthcare, B2B, and non-profit sectors transform marketing challenges into growth opportunities. She is motivated by meaningful impact, partnering with teams and leaders to shape the marketing function into a force that drives business growth.
Last updated on June 12th, 2026 at 05:44 am