The complete guide for business owners — what AEO actually is, how it differs from SEO, and the signals AI platforms read before they recommend anyone.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content, brand information and digital presence so that AI platforms — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity — cite and recommend your business when customers ask questions. SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you recommended.
For twenty years, being found meant ranking in a list of ten blue links. Now a growing share of buying decisions start with a question put to an AI assistant — and the assistant answers with one, two, maybe three recommendations. There is no page two. If your business isn't in the answer, you were never in the running.
AEO is the discipline of earning that spot. It treats every AI platform as an "answer engine" and asks one question: when someone describes the problem you solve, does the machine say your name?
They're complementary, not competing. Strong SEO gives AI models crawlable, credible material to learn from — AEO makes sure what they learn is accurate, consistent and quotable. Doing AEO without SEO foundations is building on sand; doing SEO without AEO is optimising for a shrinking share of attention.
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AEO has its own scoreboard. Instead of rank positions, you track: citation share (how often AI answers cite you vs competitors for your key questions), answer accuracy (does AI describe your business correctly), entity consistency (does every platform agree on who you are), and AI-referred traffic and enquiries. We package these into a single Visibility Score so you can watch it move.
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers ask — "best [what you do] in [your city]", "who should I hire for [problem]". If you're absent or described incorrectly, start with the foundations: consistent business details everywhere, schema markup on every page, answer-shaped content, and a deliberate program of earning mentions on sources AI trusts. Or run our 21-point self-audit first.
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