What it means
Search results increasingly answer the question on the page: a summary at the top, a snippet lifted from somebody's site, a box with the hours in it. Answer engine optimisation is writing so that the extractable answer is on your page, in a form a machine can pull out cleanly.
Why it matters to a small business
The traffic from being quoted is smaller than the traffic from being clicked, and the influence is larger. For a local business the answer is often the whole transaction: somebody asks whether you do same-day repairs, gets told yes, and rings. That never registers as a website visit and it is still the booking.
The bit people get wrong
It is a different job from ranking, and the writing that wins it is unfashionable. Short, direct, self-contained answers get extracted. A long scene-setting paragraph before you say the thing gets skipped, however well it reads.