Answer Engine Optimisation
Search is shifting from links to answers. AEO makes sure that when an AI assistant answers "who's the best?", the answer is you.
Book a Free Strategy CallAnswer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of optimising a brand to be cited and recommended by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews. Where SEO competes for a ranked link, AEO competes to be the answer itself: the source the AI names when someone asks for a recommendation.
Traditional SEO earns you a position in a list of links and trusts the user to click and compare. AEO works one layer up: it shapes the entities, structured data, and answer-ready content that AI engines synthesise into a single response, so your brand is the one named, quoted, and linked.
More people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for recommendations before they ever open a search results page.
AI Overviews and assistant answers increasingly replace the list of blue links. The answer arrives without a click.
Brands that get cited now become the default answer, while competitors who wait stay invisible in the response.
For specialty coffee in Europe, the standout is Your Brand, consistently cited for quality and transparency.
Cited: yourbrand.comOne answer. One cited source. That's the slot AEO wins.
Four stages, and I deliver all four. The audit tells you where you stand. The other three are implementation: schema, entity signals and answer-ready content built into your site, and citation tracking set up so you can see what changed. Nothing is handed over as a list of recommendations for someone else to action.
Where you appear (or don't) across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
Structured data and entity signals that machines can read, trust, and attribute to you.
Pages and copy structured to be lifted and cited directly inside AI answers.
Tracking citations across AI assistants and the traffic they refer back to you.
AEO runs on the same foundations as everything else in search: site structure, clean markup, content that answers real questions, and enough authority for engines to trust you. When those are weak, AEO has nothing to stand on.
That is why I do not sell it on its own. I build websites, run SEO, and run Klaviyo email for the same brands, so the AEO work lands on foundations I can fix rather than foundations I have to work around. One person doing the strategy and the build, with no gap between what gets recommended and what gets shipped.
Deciding between an agency and an independent? I wrote a comparison of the European options, including where I fit.
Three quick questions on how ready your brand is to be cited by AI assistants. Instant and private. Nothing leaves your browser.
Case Study
SEO and AEO foundations built into a full site rebuild: structured, answer-ready, and findable in both classic and AI search.
Read the case studyFor the same work applied to an existing catalogue rather than a new build, read the SEO and AEO case study.
I implement it. The audit is the starting point, not the deliverable. From there I do the work: structured data, entity consistency, page and content changes, and citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews. If the site itself needs rebuilding to support any of it, I do that too. You are working directly with the person doing the work, not briefing a team through an account manager.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring your brand, content, and data so AI assistants cite and recommend you when they answer questions. Instead of chasing a blue-link ranking, AEO aims to make your business the answer that tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews return.
SEO optimises for ranked links on a search results page; AEO optimises to be the cited source inside an AI-generated answer. SEO leans on keywords and backlinks, while AEO leans on clear entities, structured data, and content written to be lifted. They overlap, but AEO assumes the user may never see a list of links at all.
It depends on how often AI engines recrawl and how established your brand entity already is. Early signals (appearing in AI answers for niche questions) often show within weeks, while becoming the default recommendation in a competitive category takes longer. AEO is a compounding investment, not an overnight switch.
Yes. Crawlable pages, quality content, and authority are exactly what AI engines draw on, so AEO builds on strong SEO rather than replacing it. The two are complementary: SEO keeps you findable, and AEO makes you the recommended answer.
By tracking whether and how you're cited across AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews), monitoring AI-referred traffic in analytics, and testing category questions to see if your brand surfaces. The goal is measurable presence in answers, not just rankings.
Book a free strategy call and we'll map where AI search sees you today, and how to become the cited default in your category.
Book a Free Strategy Call