Answer engine optimization is the practice of shaping content so that a surface which answers a question directly adopts that answer and links the page it came from.
This is the sense CiteAngle uses when it measures. The word travels with other meanings in this market, so we pin ours before it turns up in a report.
Where this lands in the measurement
The question is not where you rank. It is whose answer gets used and which source gets linked underneath it.
So the counted events are answer-surface appearance, answer adoption and the sources attached.
What it costs to leave this loose
Optimise for rank alone and you can hold the top link while a different source supplies the answer sitting above it. Nothing in a rank report names that.
Appearance on the answer surface, adoption of the answer and the attached source are counted as separate events, so you can see which of the three is missing.
Who you want measuring this
One reading does not settle a term like this. The answer an assistant writes today can name different companies tomorrow, so a Panorama round puts 50 buyer questions to every place on our US list, 7 separate times each, and reads all 17 of them — ChatGPT · Perplexity · Claude · Gemini · Grok · Google AI Overviews · Google AI Mode · Bing Copilot · DuckDuckGo AI Assist · Google Search · Bing Search · Yahoo Search · DuckDuckGo Search · Google News · Bing News · YouTube · Google Short Videos. Radar starts at 5 questions and covers the same list under the same rule.
We put the same questions to the competitors you name inside the same runs, so you see both in one table. The conditions are sealed, so you can reproduce the round and check it, and every planned observation is published with its state, failures included. When you choose who measures this, check that all three are in place.
That describes how the measuring is done. It is not a promise about where your numbers land.
Pages that use this term
Terms worth pinning at the same time