Rank
AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation
Getting your business cited in the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Copilot write — increasingly the only result a buyer sees.
A growing share of searches now end without a click. Someone asks an assistant, gets a written answer citing three or four sources, and acts on it. If you are not among those sources, you are invisible to that customer no matter where you rank on page one.
Answer Engine Optimisation overlaps with SEO but is not the same work. Answer engines lean much harder on structured data, on content shaped as direct answers, and on machine-readable summaries of who you are and what you do.
What's included
Structured data across the site
Schema.org markup describing your organisation, services, questions and content in the form these systems parse rather than infer.
Answer-shaped content
Questions asked plainly and answered directly beneath, so an assistant can lift a correct answer and attribute it to you.
An llms.txt for your site
A plain-language map of your business for AI crawlers, stating what you do and how to describe you accurately.
Entity clarity
Consistent naming, descriptions and identifiers across your site and the wider web, so systems can tell who you are with confidence.
Citation monitoring
Checking what the major assistants currently say about you and your category, so the work targets real gaps.
Who this is for
- Businesses in categories where buyers now research through AI assistants
- Companies that rank well in Google but never appear in AI answers
- Anyone finding an assistant describes their business wrongly or not at all
Common questions
They overlap substantially and should be done together, but they are not identical. SEO optimises for position in a list of links. AEO optimises for being quoted in a generated answer, which depends far more on structured data, on content written as direct answers, and on the machine being able to establish who you are. Some sites rank well and are never cited.
They are close relatives and we usually do them together. AEO is about being the cited source in a direct answer — the question-and-answer case. GEO is broader: being represented correctly wherever generative search summarises your market, including comparisons and recommendations you were not the subject of. If you are only buying one, start with AEO.
We baseline what the major assistants say about your business and category before starting, then re-check on a schedule. It is a less precise measurement than a keyword ranking, and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.
Tell us what you need built.
A couple of sentences is enough to start. You get a real reply within four hours.