Video AEO is answer-engine optimization applied to video: structuring a video, and the page that hosts it, so AI answer engines can retrieve, understand, and cite what it says. Because an engine lifts text, not footage, video AEO is mostly about the video's transcript, captions, title, description, chapters, and structured data rather than its production values.
The practice matters because video became a top AI-citation source in 2026. Ahrefs' mid-2026 data put YouTube as the single most-cited domain in Google AI Overviews at roughly 20.9% mention share, ahead of every publisher and brand site, helped by Google owning YouTube and being able to read its transcripts. A separate Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found YouTube mentions correlated with AI brand visibility more strongly than any other metric. These are single-vendor, directional figures, but the direction is consistent.
In practice, video AEO means answering one question per video, answer-first; publishing an accurate transcript rather than relying on auto-captions; adding chapters and a fact-rich description; and marking up the hosting page with VideoObject schema. It is the video-shaped case of multimodal search: expose the facts as retrievable text, or the engine can't cite them.