The Marketer’s Guide To Answer Engine Optimization

This holiday season, answer engines such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode — in addition to retailers’ owned and operated properties, search engines, and virtual assistants — will create and retain commercial intent, traffic, and some sales. Answer engines make shopping more convenient (for those who are more comfortable using answer engines than other media). Ultimately, shoppers are loyal to convenience. Answer engines deliver convenience by:

Supplying information symmetry. Answer engines offer rich, immersive details about how merchants and other shoppers perceive the quality of products. According to Forrester’s July 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey, 29% of US online adults struggle to buy apparel online because they “can’t tell the material and quality of what [they are] buying based on the product page.” When consumers ask ChatGPT questions about a product, the engine queries merchants’ product feeds, brands’ owned and operated properties, crowdsourced forums like Reddit, and more — offering consumers nearly complete information to learn more about, compare, and purchase products.
Minimizing shoppers’ time to value. Answer engines empower shoppers to complete deeper, faster research than they can on traditional search engines. ChatGPT gets, on average, about eight prompts per user per day, compared to three queries per user per day on classic Google search. And prompts on answer engines are, on average, six times longer than queries on search engines. Yet sessions on answer engines typically don’t last as long as those on search engines, and answer engines also accelerate business buyers’ journeys. According to Forrester’s Buyers’ Journey Survey, 2025, answer engines help 28% of B2B buyers spend less time doing research. Despite faster journeys, 57% of B2B buyers consider more or different vendors, which highlights the efficiency and efficacy of answer engines.
Making shopping as natural as speaking. Answer engines enhance the capabilities of virtual assistants like Alexa and Siri, which introduced millions of consumers to voice-based shopping. Most consumers still use virtual assistants for informational, rather than commercial, queries, but answer engines are changing the game. ChatGPT’s paid subscribers can access “agent mode,” which integrates Shopify for voice-based transactions. Per Forrester’s May 2025 Consumer Pulse Survey, about one in five US online adults use voice commands with a virtual assistant to research products/services to purchase at least weekly. That number will rise as virtual assistants make it easier to discover products, add items to shopping lists, track packages, and provide ratings and reviews. As consumers become more comfortable with prompting answer engines, voice-based searches and commerce across answer engines will grow commensurately.

Enhance Content To Prepare For Commerce Across Answer Engines

Having resonant, technically sound, and fresh content improves a brand’s ability to persuade shoppers throughout their journeys that begin and end on answer engines’ results pages. To capitalize on commerce across answer engines, marketers should:

Map authoritative content to questions. Anticipate and satisfy commercial intent across answer engines by modeling the questions that shoppers ask in different phases of their journeys. Then, create credible content that specifically answers FAQs. Listen to conversations on Reddit and Quora to glean FAQs. Develop distinctive yet simple content that associates your brand with the topics that are important to shoppers. Distribute content authored by in-house and third-party subject matter experts on and off your site to grow share of voice. The more effective you are, the higher answer engines’ opinions will be of your products.
Make content indexable. Answer engine crawlers are more active and less forgiving than search engine crawlers. They’re still in training, so they ignore protocols such as robots.txt, visit the same page repeatedly every few hours, and hit websites with hundreds of requests per second. Regularly update sitemaps, establish a clear and logical internal linking structure, implement schema, and pre-render pages so crawlers can easily index content for shoppers as they discover, evaluate, and commit to products and services.

Check out my latest report — Best Practices For Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — to learn more, and stay tuned for forthcoming research in a report titled “Zero-Click Search Goes Shopping: What Commerce On Answer Engines Will Mean For Marketers.” As always, feel free to request a guidance session with me.