Answer Engine Optimization

When buyers ask AI, your brand should be the answer.

Search is splitting in two. Half your future buyers will never see a results page - they will read one AI-generated answer and act on it. We make sure your brand is inside that answer, described accurately, and cited by name.

What does an AEO agency actually do?

An AEO agency makes a brand citable by AI answer engines. That means defining the brand as an unambiguous entity in structured data, rewriting content into concise direct answers models can extract, opening the site to AI crawlers, and building the third-party corroboration that makes an engine confident enough to name you.

  • Entity definition so models know exactly what you are
  • Schema architecture across every page type
  • Direct-answer content built for extraction, not padding
  • Share-of-answer tracking across the major assistants

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a brand's content and entity data - direct-answer paragraphs, schema markup, consistent naming, and machine-readable files like llms.txt - so AI answer engines can accurately find, understand, trust, and cite it. It is also called generative engine optimization (GEO) or AI search optimization.

What's Included

Everything in an AEO engagement.

  • AI visibility baseline across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews
  • Entity definition and knowledge graph alignment
  • Structured data architecture - Organization, Service, FAQPage, HowTo, Person
  • Direct-answer content restructuring on money pages
  • llms.txt authoring and AI crawler configuration
  • Off-site consistency audit across every profile that describes you
  • Share-of-answer tracking and reporting

Answer engines cite what they understand.

Models do not rank pages - they assemble answers. Getting cited depends on whether a machine can resolve who you are, what you do, and whether independent sources agree.

One unambiguous entity
Machine-readable structure
Answers written to be quoted
Corroboration models can trust
A structured knowledge system resolving scattered signals into one clearly defined entity
AEO: engineering the conditions for a citation.
The Method

How we get brands cited by AI answer engines.

01

Audit

We query the answer engines your buyers use and record whether you appear, how you are described, and who gets cited instead.

02

Define

We make the brand machine-legible - consistent entity data across schema, llms.txt, and every off-site profile.

03

Structure

We rebuild key pages around question-shaped headings with concise, self-contained answers models can quote.

04

Corroborate

We build the independent third-party mentions that turn a claim into something an answer engine will repeat.

AEO FAQ

What founders ask about AI search visibility.

An AEO agency optimizes a brand for Answer Engine Optimization - making it discoverable and citable inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. The work centres on entity clarity, structured data, and direct-answer content rather than the backlink and keyword tactics that define traditional SEO agencies.

SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) optimizes for being the answer an AI assistant gives. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is a near-synonym for AEO used more often in academic writing. In practice AEO and GEO describe the same work: making content machine-extractable and your brand entity unambiguous.

Three things compound: a clearly defined entity that answer engines can resolve without ambiguity, content structured as concise direct answers under question-shaped headings, and corroboration from independent third-party sources. Allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt and publishing an llms.txt file makes your content accessible in the first place.

No. AEO runs alongside SEO and shares most of its foundations - crawlability, clean information architecture, and genuinely useful content. What changes is the target: SEO earns a click from a results page, while AEO earns a citation inside an answer where there may be no results page at all. Brands need both.

We track share of answer - how often your brand is mentioned across a fixed set of buyer-intent prompts in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews - plus how accurately you are described, which competitors appear alongside you, and referral traffic arriving from AI assistants.

Structural work - schema, entity data, llms.txt, and answer formatting - can change how models describe you within weeks of being recrawled. Building the third-party corroboration that makes an answer engine confident enough to cite you consistently takes longer and compounds over months.

The next move

Find out what AI says about you right now.

Book a strategy call and we'll run live prompts against the answer engines your buyers use - and show you exactly how your brand is being described.

Book a strategy call