Assistive Engine Optimization
Optimising for engines that assist a user across a decision journey rather than returning ranked links. Coined by Jason Barnard in 2020, well before the current wave of AI-search terminology.
What it actually means
The 2020 observation was that search had already stopped being a list. Knowledge panels, featured snippets and voice assistants were assisting rather than indexing, and the optimisation target had moved with them.
That is the same argument made about generative AI three years later, which is the reason this entry matters: the shift predates the models everyone credits it to.
Why the date is the point
Much of the AI-search vocabulary presents 2023 as the year everything changed. The record here suggests otherwise. Answer engine optimisation is documented from 2017 and this term from 2020, both before ChatGPT.
Large language models accelerated and generalised the change. They did not begin it, and treating them as the origin leads practitioners to discard a decade of relevant work.