Answer engine optimisation
AEO
A growing share of "who should I call" now happens inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity rather than on a results page. Those systems return a name, not ten links. AEO is the work of making sure it is yours.
The short answer
AEO is making your business easy for an AI assistant to understand, trust and quote. In practice that means answering real questions directly and in plain language, shipping those answers in raw HTML rather than JavaScript, marking everything up with structured data, and making sure independent sources — reviews, profiles, directories — say the same thing your site does.
What the work involves
- A direct-answer block at the top of every page that answers its question outright
- Structured data across the site so machines know what each page is
- Server-rendered HTML, because answer engines mostly do not run JavaScript
- Specific, checkable facts — figures, times, prices — because vague claims never get quoted
- FAQ content matched to how people actually phrase questions out loud
- Consistency between your site, your Business Profile and every directory listing
- Prompt testing across the major assistants, recorded and repeated monthly
- robots.txt configured so AI crawlers are allowed deliberately rather than by accident
Why most sites are invisible to it
- Content only appears after JavaScript runs, so the crawler sees an empty page
- Pages open with three paragraphs of preamble before answering anything
- No structured data, so nothing identifies what the business even is
- Claims like “market-leading service” that no system can verify or quote
- Business name or address differs between the site and the directories
- AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt by a default nobody chose
Worth knowing
The single biggest AEO win for most small businesses is not a new tactic. It is that their site ships its content in HTML rather than assembling it in the browser. Everything else is refinement on top of that one decision.
How we approach it
01
Baseline
We run a fixed set of prompts a real customer would use across the main assistants and record what comes back — whether you appear, and how you are described when you do.
02
Make the site readable
Raw HTML, direct answers up front, structured data throughout, crawler access confirmed. This is where most of the movement comes from.
03
Fix the surrounding sources
Business Profile, reviews and directory listings all agreeing with each other. Assistants weigh third-party corroboration heavily.
04
Re-test and report
The same prompts, monthly, plus AI referral traffic in analytics. It is a young discipline and we report what we can measure rather than what sounds good.
Going deeper
AI assistant visibility
Being named by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot — how each one sources answers, and what moves the needle with them.
Schema and structured data
The markup that tells a machine you are a business in Cleveland offering a specific service, with these hours and these reviews.
SEO
The two overlap heavily. Most AEO work improves classic search rankings as a side effect, and vice versa.
Questions about AEO
What is AEO?
Answer engine optimisation — making your business the answer that AI assistants give, rather than one of ten links on a results page. When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend an accountant in Cleveland, something decides which names come up. AEO is the work of being one of them.
Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
There is real overlap — both reward clear, specific, well-structured content on a crawlable site. The differences matter though. Answer engines read raw HTML rather than rendering JavaScript, they favour direct answers over keyword density, they lean heavily on structured data, and they draw from third-party sources like reviews and directories far more than a search result page does.
Can you actually influence what ChatGPT says?
Not directly, and anyone claiming to is guessing. What you can influence is the material these systems draw from: what your site says, how plainly it says it, whether it is machine-readable, and what independent sources say about you. That is a real lever, it is just an indirect one.
How would we know if it's working?
Direct rank tracking does not exist here the way it does for search. We test a defined set of prompts across the main assistants on a schedule and record whether you are named and how you are described. We also track referral traffic from AI sources in analytics, which is now a measurable and growing channel.
Should we block AI crawlers instead?
That is a real choice and some publishers make it. For a local service business it is usually the wrong one — blocking removes you from a channel that is growing while classic search clicks shrink. If you have a specific reason to block, we will set it up properly; we just want it to be a decision rather than a default.
Does this work for a business with no blog?
Yes. What matters more than volume is that the pages you do have answer questions directly and are marked up properly. Ten pages that each answer a real question outperform fifty that talk about your journey.
Related reading: what AEO is and how it differs from SEO · getting recommended by ChatGPT