What is answer engine optimisation, and does your business need it?

Your buyers increasingly ask a machine before they ask a search box. When someone types a question about your category into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or a Google AI overview, the assistant answers and, sometimes, names a source. Answer engine optimisation is the work of making that source you.

The part that is real today

Most of AEO is not new. It is the same structured-data and entity work that already sits inside a good SEO engagement: clean FAQ, Organization, LocalBusiness and Article schema, consistent entities across your site, and content written so a machine can extract a clear answer without guessing. That foundation is live, repeatable and sellable now, and it helps whether the reader is a person or a model.

The part that is genuinely emerging

The newer layer is tracking and improving how often the assistants actually cite you, and moving the inputs that change that. We are honest that this is emerging rather than a fully running managed service. We can build the foundation that makes you citable and measure share of answer where your buyers are, but we will not promise a guaranteed placement in an AI answer, because that is not something anyone can control.

Does your business actually need it?

AEO earns its keep when two things are true. First, your buyers research with AI assistants before they reach you. Second, you already have authority and structured content worth citing. If both hold, being the named source in your category is worth real money. If neither holds yet, the honest move is to build the SEO and authority foundation first, because there is little for a model to cite when the underlying pages are thin.

• Good fit: a considered B2B purchase where buyers ask assistants during research and you have expertise worth quoting.
• Premature: no structured data, thin content, or a category with little AI-assisted research behind it.

How it relates to SEO

AEO is not a rename of SEO, but it shares the foundation. The target is different: the quoted passage, not the clicked link. In practice it runs alongside a properly run SEO programme rather than instead of it, which is why we rarely sell it on its own.

How to think about spend

Because the foundation overlaps so heavily with SEO, the sensible question is not usually AEO versus SEO as separate budgets. It is which foundation to build first and how far to push the emerging layer. We would rather scope exactly what we can measure for you than sell a tracking service that promises more than the technology reliably delivers.

What the work actually involves

In practice, becoming citable is less exotic than it sounds. It means giving each important page a clear, extractable answer near the top, marking it up so a machine can parse it without guessing, and keeping your entities consistent so the assistant is confident it is describing the right company. It means having something worth quoting: primary data, a defensible position, reference pages written to be cited rather than only to rank. Much of that is work a good SEO engagement already does.

The measurement is where honesty matters most. We baseline how often you are named across the major assistants, track it question by question, and report share of answer up or down. We do not report impressions dressed up as citations, and we do not claim a guaranteed placement, because the models decide what to quote and no vendor controls that. What we can do is move the inputs they demonstrably use, then show you what changed.

If you take one thing from this, let it be the sequence: build the foundation that makes you citable, measure honestly, and treat the emerging tracking layer as exactly that. Done in that order, AEO is a sensible extension of work you should be doing anyway rather than a separate leap of faith.

If you want the mechanics, the AEO service page sets out what is live and what is emerging, and if you are weighing where to put the first pound, read AEO versus SEO and where to spend first.