SEO and AEO

What changed

For twenty years, search meant a list of links. Now a growing share of questions get answered directly — in Google's AI Overviews, or inside an assistant that names two or three businesses and never shows a list at all.

That does not make SEO obsolete. AI answers are assembled from indexed web content, so ranking well remains the price of entry. What changes is that being ranked is no longer sufficient. Your content has to be structured so a machine can extract a clear answer and attribute it to you.

The work behind both

Answer Engine Optimization is less exotic than it sounds. It rewards clarity, structure, and specificity — the things good SEO always rewarded, applied more rigorously.

• Technical foundations. Fast pages, clean crawling, sensible site structure. If a search engine struggles with your site, an AI crawler will too.
• Structured data. Schema markup that states plainly what your business is, what you sell, and what you charge. This is how a machine reads your page without guessing.
• Answer-shaped content. Real questions with direct answers near the top, in language a person actually uses. Vague, promotional copy cannot be quoted, because there is nothing in it to quote.
• Specific, verifiable detail. Prices, timelines, materials, coverage areas. AI answers favour content that commits to something.
• Corroboration elsewhere. What other sites and directories say about you affects how confidently you get recommended.

Measuring something that hides the numbers

AI assistants do not publish rankings, and much of their referral traffic arrives unattributed. We track what can be tracked — the queries where you appear, whether assistants name you when asked about your category, and the search visibility that feeds them.

We would rather show you an honest partial picture than a confident invented one.

FAQ

What is AEO?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization: the practice of getting your business cited inside the answers written by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, rather than only ranked in a list of links. It relies on the same indexed content as SEO, but puts much more weight on clear structure, structured data, and specific, quotable detail.

Is SEO still worth it if AI is answering questions?

Yes, and more than before. AI answers are assembled from indexed web content, so pages that rank well are the pages most likely to be quoted. What has changed is that ranking alone is no longer enough — content also has to be structured so an assistant can extract a clear answer and attribute it to your business.

How do I know if AI is recommending my business?

Ask it. Put the questions your customers would ask into ChatGPT or Perplexity and see whether you are named. It is not a precise measurement, but it is a direct one, and it tells you more than most dashboards. We run these checks regularly for clients and track how the answers change over time.