AEO services

Answer Engine Optimisation that gets your business cited by AI search

TL;DR

We restructure your website's content, schema, and metadata so ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews surface and cite your business when users ask relevant questions. Free initial audits for genuine enquiries; in-depth written audits from £450, implementation from £1,800, retainers from £350/month.

Looking for something smaller? · New
Try the AEO Hub — bolt AEO onto your existing site, from £1,200

5 answer pages on your domain in 2 weeks, no CMS changes, no rebuild. The right entry point if you don't need full AEO across a whole site yet.

What is Answer Engine Optimisation?

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — also called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — is the practice of structuring your website's content, code, and metadata so that AI-powered search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude, and others — surface and cite your business when users ask relevant questions. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimises for ranked links on a results page, AEO optimises for being the *answer* an AI gives directly.

AEO sits on top of solid SEO foundations: clean schema, fast pages, clear content structure, and trustworthy authorship signals. Where it diverges is in how content itself is written and arranged — direct answers to real questions, structured for quotation, with the supporting evidence (data, examples, source links) that AI engines look for before citing.

Why does AEO matter now?

AI search is no longer a side feature. Google AI Overviews now sit above traditional results for an estimated 30%+ of UK queries. ChatGPT processes hundreds of millions of weekly queries. Perplexity is becoming a default research tool for B2B buyers. For a growing share of high-intent traffic, the AI's answer *is* the search result.

If your website isn't structured to be cited, you're invisible to that traffic — even if you rank #1 in classic Google. The businesses winning right now are the ones whose content shows up inside the AI answer, with their brand named and their URL linked. That's an addressable problem: it's mostly content structure, schema, and authority signals that need fixing.

How is AEO different from SEO?

SEO optimises a page to rank in a list of links. AEO optimises a page (and the wider site) to be quoted *inside* an AI-generated answer. The two share foundations — page speed, crawlability, schema, internal linking — but diverge sharply in how content is written.

AEO content leads with the answer, not the build-up. Each section is structured around a real question a human would type into an LLM. Paragraphs are short and self-contained, so a model can lift one without losing meaning. Schema is heavier and more specific (FAQPage, HowTo, Article, Person, Organization). And success is measured in citations, not just rankings.

What does an AEO project actually involve?

A typical AEO engagement starts with an audit: we test your current site against schema validators, run live queries on ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity to see where you're cited (or not), and check your llms.txt and robots.txt for AI crawler access. You get a written report with prioritised fixes within five working days.

Implementation usually involves restructuring existing pages into question-led format, deploying complete Schema.org coverage, publishing /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt, building out an /answers/ content section targeting high-volume LLM queries, and configuring AI bot access. Most implementations take two to four weeks depending on site size.

How do you measure AEO success?

We track three things month-on-month: AI citation rate (how often your site is named in answers across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for target queries), classic search visibility (because AI engines still draw heavily on Google's index), and qualified inbound traffic and leads.

Citations are tracked manually with screenshots — there's no perfect tool for this yet, though that's changing fast. Reports are sent monthly with the queries tested, the answers given, and which sources the AI named. Where we're cited, we know it's working. Where we're not, we know what to fix next.

How to engage us

Three ways to work with us, depending on where you're starting from.

AEO In-Depth Audit
£450
5 working days. Yours to keep. Free basic audit also available.
  • ✓ Schema audit across every page
  • ✓ llms.txt + robots.txt review
  • ✓ Content structure analysis
  • ✓ Citation testing across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews
  • ✓ Prioritised written recommendations
Order in-depth audit
Most popular
AEO Implementation
From £1,800
2–4 weeks. Fixed price.
  • ✓ Schema markup across the whole site
  • ✓ llms.txt + llms-full.txt published
  • ✓ Content restructured for citation
  • ✓ FAQ pages and answer pages built
  • ✓ Technical fixes (redirects, indexing, performance)
Get a quote
AEO Retainer
From £350/mo
Monthly. Cancel any time.
  • ✓ 1–2 new answer pages per month
  • ✓ Ongoing schema updates
  • ✓ Monthly citation tracking report
  • ✓ Content production support
  • ✓ Quarterly strategy review
Talk about a retainer

AEO questions, answered

The questions we get most often during discovery calls.

How long until I start seeing AI citations? +
First citations typically appear 4–12 weeks after implementation, depending on your category and competition. AI engines re-index at different cadences — Perplexity tends to pick up new content fastest, ChatGPT and Claude more slowly. We track and report monthly so you see momentum building.
Will AEO conflict with my existing SEO? +
No. AEO is built on the same foundations — fast pages, clean schema, well-structured content — and almost always lifts traditional rankings as a side effect. We've yet to see a case where AEO work hurt classic search performance.
Do I need to rebuild my whole website to do AEO? +
Not necessarily. We can do AEO on an existing WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace site if it's structurally sound. The catch is that slow, plugin-heavy sites are harder to optimise and don't get cited as often even with perfect schema. If your site is fundamentally broken, a rebuild will give a much better return on AEO investment.
Which AI engines do you optimise for? +
We test and track across ChatGPT (with web browsing), Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews as standard. We also configure for OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, GPTBot, Bingbot, and Applebot to ensure your content is accessible to current and future AI crawlers.
What's llms.txt and why does it matter? +
llms.txt is an emerging convention (proposed by Jeremy Howard) that gives AI engines a clean, markdown-formatted summary of your site's structure and key content. Think of it as a sitemap written for LLMs. We publish both /llms.txt (summary) and /llms-full.txt (full content dump) on every site we ship — including this one.
Can you do AEO without a retainer? +
Yes. Many clients start with a one-off Audit + Implementation and then maintain it themselves. A retainer makes sense if your category is moving fast (more competitors entering, AI engines updating frequently) or if content production is genuinely ongoing.
Do you do AEO for clients outside Greater Manchester? +
Yes. While we prioritise local clients for rebuilds (because we like meeting in person), AEO work is largely remote-friendly and we work with clients across the UK and occasionally further afield.
What schema markup do I actually need? +
At minimum: Organization (or LocalBusiness if you serve a geographic area), WebSite with SearchAction, and Article on long-form content. For service businesses, also Service with Offer pricing. For Q&A content, FAQPage. For people/authors, Person. We deploy the full appropriate set during implementation and validate every page through Google's Rich Results test.
Is this the same as GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)? +
Yes. GEO is the newer term — coined specifically for generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. AEO is the older umbrella term that's been retrofitted to cover the same work. In practice they describe the same set of activities: schema, content structure for citation, llms.txt, AI crawler access, and citation tracking. We default to AEO in our copy because that's the term most UK marketing teams use, but if your team prefers GEO it's the same engagement.

Find out where you're cited (and where you're not)

Book a free site audit and we'll send back the headline citation and schema issues within five working days. Want the full written report? Upgrade to the £450 in-depth audit any time.

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