AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines — chat assistants and AI-powered search — can find, understand, and cite it when composing answers. Where classic SEO optimizes for ranked links a human clicks, AEO optimizes for being the source an engine draws on when it answers the user directly.
Answer engines changed the shape of discovery: users increasingly receive a synthesized answer with citations instead of a page of links, which means visibility now depends on whether a model retrieved your content and found it usable while composing that answer. AEO is the discipline that grew around influencing that outcome.
In practice AEO work concentrates on legibility to models: clear structure, extractable answer-first definitions, consistent terminology, machine-readable signals, and content organized so a retrieval system can lift the relevant passage cleanly. The closely related term GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — covers substantially the same ground, and the two are often used interchangeably.
Discry applies the same discipline to a different surface: the API. Where AEO concerns whether answer engines can find and cite a website's content, Discry measures whether agents can find and understand an API from its public documentation — discovery signals probed on a plain fetch, plus behavioral quizzes of real models on the docs. For an API, the equivalent of being cited is being chosen for an integration, and that choice is what the Discry Score exists to predict.
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