Getting cited
when nobody clicks.
Answer Engine Optimisation is getting your product accurately described and cited when someone asks an AI assistant, rather than when they type into a search box. The answer is synthesised, one or two sources are cited, and the rest are invisible. Ranking fourth used to mean some traffic. Now it means none.
How we do it
Baseline your citation share
We run your category's real questions across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews and record who gets cited today. Usually it is a competitor or a listicle nobody at your company has read.
Fix what makes you unquotable
One name per product, schema that matches the visible page, answers in the first sentence, and no contradictory claims across your own pages. This is the unglamorous half and it is where most of the gain is.
Write the answers that are missing
Pages that answer the questions being asked, in the form an assistant can lift. Comparison and definition pages tend to earn citations; keyword-stuffed listicles tend not to.
Track and keep going
Citation share re-measured on a schedule, so you can see whether a change moved anything rather than assuming it did.
The tools we built for this
We use these on our own sites. You can use them without hiring us.
Where this sits next to SEO
They run on the same foundations, so the work overlaps almost entirely. The difference is what winning looks like: SEO earns a position in a list a person chooses from, AEO earns a citation inside an answer where nothing gets chosen. Most sites still take the majority of their traffic from classic search, so this is an additional surface rather than a replacement.
See how we approach SEOQuestions people actually ask
What is AEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of getting your product accurately described and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question, rather than when they type a query into a search box. The unit of success is a citation inside an answer, not a blue link at position three.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO optimises for a ranked list a person then chooses from. AEO optimises for a synthesised answer where usually nothing is chosen — one or two sources get cited and the rest are invisible. Structured data, unambiguous entity naming and content that answers a question in its first sentence matter far more; keyword density matters far less.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. The same content and the same technical foundations feed both, and most sites still get the majority of their traffic from classic search. AEO is an additional surface, not a replacement — and the work overlaps enough that doing one badly hurts the other.
How do you measure whether AEO is working?
By running a fixed set of prompts across the assistants on a schedule and recording which sources get cited for each. That gives a citation share you can track over time. We built AI Visibility Tracker and Fenn to do exactly this.
What actually changes on my site?
Usually: schema that describes what the page really shows, one canonical name per product instead of three, answers moved to the top of the page, and pages that answer a real question rather than targeting a keyword. Often it also means removing things — contradictory descriptions confuse an answer engine more than sparse ones.
Want to know who gets cited in your category?
We will run the baseline and show you.