Answer Capsule
Answer Capsule — A bolded 1-2 sentence direct answer placed immediately after a question-format heading. Answer capsules are designed to be easily extracted by AI engines as citations. The pattern is: question heading → bold direct answer → supporting details.
Answer capsules are one of the most effective GEO techniques. The pattern is simple: write a heading as a question (e.g., "What is AEO?"), then immediately follow it with a bolded 1-2 sentence answer that directly addresses the question. This gives AI engines a clean, extractable statement they can cite verbatim.
The technique works because AI engines look for concise, authoritative statements when generating citations. A bolded answer capsule signals "this is the key takeaway" in a way that both humans and AI can parse. In citation experiments, pages with answer capsules consistently outperform pages with the same information buried in paragraph text. CiteRank's Page Optimization feature identifies headings that would benefit from answer capsules.