What AEO means when marketers say it
For a marketing team, AEO is channel thinking applied to AI answers. Buyers now ask assistants for shortlists, comparisons, and recommendations, and those answers either include you or route demand to whoever they do include.
Treating that as a channel means the usual channel questions apply: who owns it, what gets produced for it, and what number tells the team it is working.
Who owns it
In most orgs the SEO or content lead picks it up, because the assets and skills overlap almost completely with organic search. In small companies it is a founder with a spreadsheet until the cadence justifies tooling.
The ownership test is simple: one person should be able to name the buyer questions being tracked and the current mention rate on them. If nobody can, the org has opinions about AEO rather than a program.
What changes in the workflow
Research
Keyword lists get joined by buyer-question sets: the comparison, recommendation, and best-of prompts where an AI mention changes outcomes.
Briefs
Pages get planned around a direct answer in the opening lines, question-form headings, and passages that survive being quoted alone.
Measurement
Rank tracking gets a sibling: mention rate across AI surfaces, measured on repeated samples with the competitor set on the same basis.
Reporting
Share of voice in AI answers enters the monthly review next to organic traffic, with the evidence available when someone asks where a number came from.
How it coexists with SEO
Same assets, different success event. A guide that ranks well and gets cited by answer engines is one artifact serving two channels, which is why forking a separate AEO team rarely makes sense.
The practical move is extending the definition of done: content ships when it is indexable, answer-first, and measured in both places. The what is AEO guide covers the underlying practice if the team is starting from zero.