What Is Agent Engine Optimization (AEO)? The Emerging Discipline Every Builder Needs to Know

What Is Agent Engine Optimization (AEO)? You know SEO. Search Engine Optimization — the discipline of making your product discoverable by Google, Bing, and the crawlers that feed them. Here is the next version of that problem: Agent Engine Optimization (AEO) . Simon Taylor (270K subscribers, Fintech Brainfood) coined the term in his Agentic Payments Map: optimizing your product so AI agents can discover, understand, and transact with it. The framing that landed hardest: "The chat interface is the new checkout." If you are building software in 2026, this is the infrastructure challenge you did not know you had. SEO vs AEO: The Core Difference SEO asks: Can a search engine index my content and rank it? AEO asks: Can an AI agent find my product, understand what it does, and complete a transaction without human help? Those are very different questions. SEO is about discoverability and authority signals. AEO is about machine-readable intent + transactable endpoints + trust verification. A p