Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the emerging discipline of optimizing content for AI-mediated answer interfaces — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, You.com, and the growing ecosystem of LLM-powered question-answering tools. AEO sits adjacent to traditional SEO: many fundamentals overlap, but the optimization patterns and success metrics differ in important ways. The shared foundation with traditional SEO: high-quality content depth, technical site health (crawlability, indexability, performance), authoritative backlinks, and topical relevance all matter for AEO because most AI answer engines retrieve from the same index that powers traditional search results. Pages that rank well organically have the strongest base for AEO success. The AEO-specific optimizations: structured information formats (lists, tables, definition lists, HowTo and FAQ schema) that AI engines can extract cleanly into answer formats; first-paragraph clarity that answers the implied question directly without preamble; declarative factual statements with specific numbers, dates, and concrete claims (vague generalizations get summarized away or skipped); descriptive headings that match likely natural-language query phrasings; and prominent E-E-A-T signals through Person schema, author bios, credentials, and citations to authoritative sources. What changes vs. traditional SEO: keyword density matters less; semantic completeness matters more (covering all the related concepts and questions a topic implies, not just the head term). Title tag optimization for click-through-rate matters less when the user gets the answer in the AI overview without clicking; instead, optimization focuses on being the cited source rather than being the clicked result. Content length matters less; information density matters more. The success metrics for AEO: citation share across target query sets (what percentage of relevant queries cite your content); referral traffic from AI surfaces (Perplexity, ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google AI Overview clicks where attributed); brand mention frequency in LLM-generated answers (measured via repeated query sampling); and quality of citations (which queries cite you authoritatively vs. mention you in passing). AEO is not a replacement for traditional SEO — it's an additional layer. Canadian businesses investing in AEO should not abandon traditional SEO fundamentals; they should layer AEO-specific optimizations on top of a solid SEO foundation. The businesses winning AEO citations in 2026 are almost universally also winning traditional organic rankings — the two compound rather than substitute.