What is answer engine optimisation, and how is it different from SEO?
AEO & SEO
Answer engine optimisation is the work of becoming a source that AI assistants cite when they answer a question, rather than a result buried on a page nobody scrolls. It shares its foundations with SEO — crawlable, fast, well-structured pages — but the target is the citation, not the ranking.
Typically One-off audit, or a retainer with a 3-month minimum
How it works
Search used to end on a results page. Now it often ends in an answer, assembled by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews, with three or four sources credited underneath. If the answer cites three sources, ranking tenth is worth nothing.
What gets cited is fairly consistent. The page answers the question directly and early. The claims are specific enough to survive being summarised — numbers, durations, named methods, stated limits. The business is unambiguous, described identically everywhere it appears. And the page is in the HTML, fast, and structured the way its content actually is.
So we measure the thing that matters and almost nobody reports on: we ask the assistants the thirty questions your customers ask, record who gets cited today, do the work, and ask again. That is the number in your monthly report, alongside rankings, coverage, and enquiries.
This is the right fit when
- Your customers research before they call
- You are invisible in AI answers and can see competitors are not
- You want the number reported, not adjectives
What is included
- Baseline audit — technical, content, entity, and current citation position
- An answer map: the questions you should own, and the page that owns each
- On-page and technical implementation, or a spec your team can build
- Validated structured data — Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article
- Machine-readable surfaces: robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and llms.txt
- Monthly reporting on citations, rankings, coverage, and enquiries
Not included, unless quoted separately
- Paid media management
- Buying links — we do not do it, at any budget
- Social media management
- Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed citations, which nobody can honestly sell
Saying what is out of scope is not us being difficult. It is the single cheapest way to avoid the argument that ends most agency relationships.
Common questions
- What is answer engine optimisation?
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of becoming a source that AI assistants cite when they answer a question. It shares its foundations with SEO — crawlable, fast, well-structured pages — but the target is the citation rather than the ranking position.
It matters because a growing share of buyers now ask an assistant before they open a search results page, and an assistant's answer credits three or four sources rather than ten.
- How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO optimises for position on a results page; AEO optimises for being quoted in a generated answer. The technical groundwork overlaps almost entirely, but the content work does not.
AEO rewards pages that answer a question directly in the first sentence, make specific and attributable claims that survive summarisation, and describe the business identically everywhere it appears. Keyword density and page count, which still move SEO metrics, do very little here.
- Can you guarantee my business will appear in ChatGPT results?
No, and neither can anyone else. AI assistants choose sources with systems that change without notice and that no agency controls.
What we do guarantee is the method and the measurement: we record which sources are cited for your customers' questions today, do the work, and re-run the same questions every month so you can see the movement rather than take our word for it.
- How do you measure whether AEO is working?
We report four numbers every month: citation share across a fixed set of buyer questions, organic position and impressions from Search Console, answer coverage — the share of mapped questions that have a page answering them — and qualified enquiries attributed to organic and AI referrers.
Referrals from assistants are tracked separately, because visitors arriving from an AI answer convert noticeably better than generic organic traffic. They arrive already convinced.
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