What does it actually ask us to change?

Put the answer in a sentence, near the question, in plain words. Most of the work is removing the habit of circling a subject in distinctive language before committing to anything, which is exactly what a lot of house style quietly rewards.

Is this different from writing well?

Barely, and that is the honest recommendation. Stating your answer clearly near the question was good advice before any of this existed and will remain good advice if every answer engine disappears tomorrow, which is more than most optimisation advice can claim.

Yes, and the over-corrected version is easy to spot. A page of disconnected assertions is quotable and unreadable, which trades a real reader for a hypothetical machine. The target is prose somebody would want to read that happens to contain liftable sentences.

Glossary

Answer engine optimisation (AEO)

Writing so that a machine reading your page can lift a direct answer out of it, which favours plain statements over brand language.

In plain terms

Writing so the answer is actually on the page, in a sentence, near the question it answers. Much marketing copy circles a subject impressively without ever stating anything, and that is the habit this asks you to drop.

Why it matters

Because the change it asks for is small, editorial and free, and because it improves the page for people at the same time. That combination is rare enough to be worth acting on without waiting to see how anything settles.

How it works

The core of it is stating the answer plainly. A page that says what something is, in a sentence, near where the question would be asked, can have that sentence lifted; a page that gestures at the subject for four paragraphs cannot.

Brand language is what gets in the way. Copy written to sound distinctive tends to avoid the flat declarative sentence, and the flat declarative sentence is the thing being looked for, so the house style is frequently the obstacle.

Structure helps because it locates the answer. A question as a heading with the answer immediately beneath it is easy to extract, and it is also how somebody scanning a page finds what they came for, which is the same benefit twice.

Nothing about this is a separate technical exercise. The eligibility to appear in a generated answer is inherited from ordinary search, so what remains is whether the page contains an extractable answer, which is a writing question.

The failure mode is over-correction into a page of disconnected statements. Something readable by a person and quotable by a machine is the target; a list of assertions with no argument between them satisfies the second and fails the first.

It applies inside an organisation as much as outside it. An internal knowledge page that states its answer plainly is the one a search tool can lift from and the one a colleague can skim, and internal pages are usually written with far less care than published ones.

The heading is doing more work than the wording under it. A page organised around the questions people actually ask, rather than around the structure of your product, is easier to extract from and easier to navigate, and reorganising costs less than rewriting.

It is worth doing whatever happens next, which is the strongest thing that can honestly be said for it. Stating your answer clearly near the question was good advice before any of this and will remain so if every answer engine disappears.

Two ways to open a page about a thing

There is an honest objection to the right-hand column worth answering, which is that leading with the plain answer can feel like giving away the substance in the first line and leaving nothing to hold a reader. In practice the opposite happens. Somebody who gets the answer immediately and finds it correct will keep reading to see what else you know; somebody made to work for it through three paragraphs of context usually leaves before the payoff and takes no view of your expertise at all. The version that fails is not the plain one, it is the page that answers plainly and then stops, because it has nothing after the answer worth staying for. That is a content problem rather than a structural one, and it is the actual work: the opening sentence is the easy part, and what earns the page is everything you can say afterwards that a summary of it could not.

Seen in the wild

A definition page whose first sentence actually defines the thing.
Perplexity
House copy rewritten so a question heading is answered directly beneath it.
Writer
An internal knowledge page a search tool can lift an answer from.
Glean

Common misconceptions

People assume

It is a technical discipline.

In fact

It is editorial. Eligibility to appear in generated answers is inherited from ordinary search, so what is left is whether the page states its answer plainly, which is a question about writing rather than about markup.

People assume

It means writing for machines rather than people.

In fact

The same properties help both. A question with its answer immediately beneath is what somebody scanning a page wants, and a page of disconnected assertions serves the machine and loses the reader.

Questions

What does it actually ask us to change?: Put the answer in a sentence, near the question, in plain words. Most of the work is removing the habit of circling a subject in distinctive language before committing to anything, which is exactly what a lot of house style quietly rewards.
Is this different from writing well?: Barely, and that is the honest recommendation. Stating your answer clearly near the question was good advice before any of this existed and will remain good advice if every answer engine disappears tomorrow, which is more than most optimisation advice can claim.
Can it be overdone?: Yes, and the over-corrected version is easy to spot. A page of disconnected assertions is quotable and unreadable, which trades a real reader for a hypothetical machine. The target is prose somebody would want to read that happens to contain liftable sentences.