ANSWER ENGINE OPTIMISATION
A growing share of buyers never reach a results page. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI and act on the answer. AEO makes sure that answer names you, links you and gets you right.
AEO is the practice of structuring your content, data and entity signals so large language models can find you, trust you and quote you accurately when they answer a question in your market.
It shares foundations with SEO, which is why the two should never be bought separately. Clear information architecture, unambiguous facts and strong entity signals serve both.
Consistent naming, structured data and third-party corroboration so models know who you are and what you do.
Definitions, comparisons and FAQs written so a single paragraph can stand alone as a quotable answer.
Organisation, Product, FAQ and Article markup applied properly, and kept valid as the site changes.
Tracking how often, and how accurately, the major engines mention you against your competitors.
COVERAGE
Appearing inside the summary that now sits above the classic results for a growing share of queries.
Being retrieved and named when buyers research categories, shortlists and suppliers conversationally.
Earning the inline citation, which carries a click rather than just a mention.
The same work strengthens traditional rankings, because clarity and authority are the shared currency.
METHOD
Large language models do not rank pages, they retrieve and summarise them. That changes what a good page looks like: self-contained answers, unambiguous facts, and structure a machine can lift without losing meaning.
The work is unglamorous. Clear definitions near the top of the page, consistent naming of your own products, facts stated in text rather than trapped in images, and schema that matches what the page actually says.
A direct answer in the opening paragraph, before the context and caveats.
Each section readable in isolation, because that is how it will be quoted.
Specifications, prices and standards written out so they can be extracted.
One canonical name per product and service, used everywhere including third parties.
DELIVERY
Six workstreams, usually run alongside an SEO programme rather than instead of one.
01
Where you are cited today across the major engines, and where competitors are cited instead.
02
How consistently your organisation, people and products are described across the web.
03
Organisation, Service, Product, FAQ and Article markup applied and validated.
04
Existing pages reworked into extractable form without losing their ranking strength.
05
New pages for the questions buyers ask assistants but nobody in your market has answered well.
06
Monthly tracking of citation share, accuracy and the queries you appear in.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Anything not covered here, ask us directly and you will get a straight answer before any proposal.
No, though they share foundations. SEO optimises for ranking a page in a list. AEO optimises for being retrieved, trusted and quoted inside a generated answer. Different success measures, overlapping work.
We can materially improve the odds by fixing what models rely on: clear entity signals, extractable content and third-party corroboration. Nobody can guarantee a specific citation, and anyone claiming otherwise is guessing.
Sometimes. Being cited is better than being omitted, because the citation carries a link and brand exposure. The bigger risk is a competitor being quoted while you are invisible.
We run a fixed set of prompts relevant to your market each month and record who is cited, how accurately, and how often you appear against named competitors.
Often less than you would expect. Restructuring strong existing pages usually beats adding new ones, because those pages already carry authority.
That is an entity problem, and it is fixable. Inconsistent descriptions across your site, directories and third-party profiles are the usual cause.
The technical and content foundations AEO builds on.
Plain-English guides to SEO and AI search.
Where AI research is changing supplier shortlists fastest.
How SEO, AEO and website work fit together.
FREE SEO & AEO AUDIT
Send your domain and we will send back a written audit: ranking and click-through gaps, technical blockers, and how often the answer engines cite you. No cost, no obligation, no automated PDF.
