AI SEARCH · AEO, GEO & ANSWER ENGINES
AI Search Optimisation — Be the Answer When Someone Asks an AI Instead of Google
AEO · GEO · Entity Clarity · Structured Answers
People are starting to ask an assistant instead of opening Google. They type a whole question into ChatGPT, or they read the AI summary sitting above the search results, and they act on that answer without clicking anything at all. If your business is not part of that answer, you are invisible in that moment.
AI search optimisation — AEO, or GEO, depending on who you ask — is the work of making sure that when an assistant talks about your market, it describes you accurately and has something clean to quote. That means clear facts, stated the same way everywhere, written in a form a machine can lift without mangling it.
I will be straight with you about the limits. Nobody controls what a language model says. There is no ranking to buy, no dashboard showing position three, and anyone selling guaranteed placement inside ChatGPT is either guessing or lying. What can be influenced is the raw material: what exists about you, how plainly it is stated, and whether it agrees with itself.
The reassuring part is that none of this is a gamble. Well structured, factually consistent, genuinely useful content is the same thing that wins featured snippets and ordinary rankings. If AI search turns out to matter less than the noise suggests, you still end up with a better site. That is why I think it is worth doing now rather than waiting.
GET YOUR FREE AI SEARCH VISIBILITY CHECK
How assistants currently describe your business
Whether you are cited at all
Facts that disagree across the web
Answer-ready formatting on key pages
Entity and brand clarity
I run the checks myself and send you what I find, with the fixes ranked. No obligation.
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CLIENT SATISFACTION
THE BASICS
What AI search optimisation actually is
Strip away the acronyms and there are four things that decide whether an assistant can use you. None of them are tricks. They are the same qualities that make a page useful to a person who is in a hurry.
Extractability
An assistant does not read your page the way a customer does. It looks for a short, self-contained passage that answers the question on its own, then lifts it. If the answer to “how much does it cost” is spread across four paragraphs and a video, there is nothing clean to take. Put the answer in one place, in plain words, near the question.
Entity clarity
A model has to know what kind of thing you are before it can recommend you. Are you a software product, a clinic, a shop, a person? Where do you operate, and who do you serve? Many sites never say this in one unambiguous sentence, and brands with a common or shared name get merged with something else entirely.
Consistency
When your own pages, your directory listings and your social profiles state the same fact three different ways, the model has no reason to trust any of them. Contradiction is worse than silence. Pick the true version of each fact and repeat it everywhere, word for word where it matters.
Corroboration
Assistants lean heavily on what other sites say about you, not only on what you say about yourself. A claim that only appears on your own homepage carries little weight. The same claim echoed in coverage, listings, reviews and third-party write-ups is far more likely to survive into an answer.
WHAT I DO
The AI search work I actually carry out
Not every piece below applies to every business. I start with the check, then we agree which of these are worth your money and which are not.
AI Search Visibility Check
You find out what assistants say about you today, rather than guessing.
I put the questions your buyers would really ask into several assistants and record what comes back, including who gets named instead of you. It is a snapshot, not a ranking, and I say so, but it is a far better starting point than opinion.
- A set of buyer questions to test
- Recorded answers from several assistants
- Who is named and cited instead of you
- Wrong or outdated facts about you
- A ranked list of what to fix first
Answer-Ready Content Formatting
Your key pages carry a clean answer a machine can lift whole.
I rewrite the openings and headings so each page states its answer directly instead of circling it for four paragraphs. Humans in a hurry benefit from exactly the same change, which is why this is the safest work on the list.
- Direct answer near the top of the page
- Question-shaped headings that match real queries
- Short summary blocks for long articles
- Definitions and key facts pulled out
- Tables and lists where prose was hiding data
Entity & Brand Clarity
It becomes obvious what your business is and is not.
We settle on one plain sentence describing what you do, who for and where, then make sure that sentence is not contradicted anywhere you control. This matters most when your name is shared with a bigger brand or a common word.
- One agreed description of the business
- Consistent name, category and location wording
- About and service pages that state it plainly
- Disambiguation from similarly named brands
- Profiles updated to match
Structured Data for Answer Engines
Machines get your facts in a form they cannot misread.
Schema markup will not force anyone to cite you, and I will not pretend otherwise. What it does is state your facts unambiguously and back up what the page already says, so I add it where it genuinely applies rather than everywhere.
- Organisation and website markup
- Product, service or article markup where it fits
- FAQ markup on pages that really answer questions
- sameAs links to your real profiles
- Validation so it parses without errors
FAQ & Question-Led Content
The questions people actually ask get a real answer on your site.
I gather the questions from search data, from your sales inbox and from what assistants are already answering badly, then write a short honest answer for each. Padding these out to hit a word count defeats the point.
- A question list drawn from real data
- Short direct answers, no filler
- Grouped into pages that make sense
- Internal links to the deeper page
- Answers kept current as things change
Fact Consistency Across the Web
Your facts stop contradicting each other in public.
I collect every version of your name, address, pricing model, founding details and service list that I can find, then flag the ones that disagree. Some sit on sites you cannot edit, and I will tell you when that is the case.
- An audit of your details across the web
- A list of contradictions, worst first
- Corrections on the profiles you control
- Requests drafted for the ones you do not
- One agreed source of truth to work from
Comparison & Alternatives Content
You have something useful to say when someone asks for the best option.
Assistants field a lot of comparison questions, and they answer them from whatever comparison content exists. Honest pages that admit where you are not the right choice tend to read as more trustworthy, to people and to models.
- The comparisons your buyers actually make
- Fair, checkable feature and pricing detail
- Clear statements of who you suit
- Equally clear statements of who you do not
- Kept up to date rather than left to rot
Knowledge Panel & Business Entity Signals
The public record of your business says what you want it to say.
Google Business Profile, your own site and the third-party listings that describe you all feed the same picture. Tidying them is unglamorous work, and it is often the difference between being recognised as an entity and being ignored.
- Google Business Profile reviewed and corrected
- Categories and descriptions aligned
- Key profiles claimed and completed
- Founder and team details made consistent
- Duplicate or stale listings dealt with
Citation-Worthy Content & Digital PR Angles
There is a reason for other people to mention you at all.
Corroboration comes from other sites, so we need something worth referencing: original data, a clear explanation nobody else has written, a genuinely useful tool. I can plan the angle and shape the piece, but earning coverage is never guaranteed.
- Angles based on what you actually know
- Original data or research you can publish
- Reference pieces written to be quoted
- A shortlist of realistic places to pitch
- An honest read on what is likely to land
AI Visibility Monitoring
You can see whether the picture is drifting, instead of wondering.
Assistants change their answers without telling anyone, so I re-run the same question set on a schedule and log what comes back. Treat it as a weather reading rather than a rank tracker, because that is honestly what it is.
- A fixed question set re-run on a schedule
- Answers logged so you can compare over time
- New errors or contradictions flagged
- Referral traffic from assistants tracked where possible
- A short note on what changed and why it might matter
WHY IT FAILS
Why most AI search efforts go nowhere
Chasing AI visibility before the basics are right
If pages will not load, will not index, or say nothing useful, no amount of AEO work will save them. Assistants are drawing on content that has been crawled and understood. Fix the ordinary problems first; the AI layer sits on top of them, not instead of them.
Content written to fill a word count
Long pages padded with restatement give a model nothing to grab. The answer is buried under throat-clearing, and the useful sentence never arrives. Shorter and blunter almost always wins here, which is uncomfortable if you are paying by the word.
The same fact stated three different ways
Your homepage says one thing, your pricing page another, an old directory listing a third. A model faced with three versions may pick the wrong one or skip the claim entirely. This is the single most common problem I find, and it is usually the cheapest to fix.
No clear answer anywhere on the page
Plenty of pages are built to make you enquire rather than to tell you anything. If the page never actually answers the question in its own title, there is nothing to quote. Withholding the answer to force a phone call costs you the citation and often the visit.
Copying whatever a competitor is doing
You cannot see why a competitor gets mentioned. It might be their content, or it might be a decade of coverage you cannot copy in a quarter. Mirroring their page structure and hoping is not a strategy, and it usually produces a worse version of their site.
Treating it as separate from SEO
AEO is not a separate department with its own budget and its own content. It is the same crawlable, well-structured, honest content, written a little more directly. Run it as a side project and you get a second set of pages that nobody maintains.
WHO IT IS FOR
Who this work tends to suit
Service businesses
Ecommerce brands
SaaS and software
B2B and lead generation
Local businesses
Publishers and content sites
Professional services
Healthcare and clinics
Financial services
Education providers
Brands with a confusing name
Agencies exploring AEO for clients
The businesses that get the most from this are the ones where buyers ask open questions before they decide: what is the best option for my situation, who does this near me, how does this compare. If your customers already know your name and type it straight into the search bar, this work matters less to you, and I would rather say that up front than take the budget.
MY APPROACH
How I work through an AI search project
01
See what assistants say today
I write out the questions a real buyer would ask, put them to several assistants and save what comes back. That gives us a baseline we can argue with. Answers vary between runs, so I treat any single reply as one reading rather than proof of anything.
02
Fix the factual base
Before writing anything new, we sort out what is already wrong. Old addresses, retired products, prices that changed two years ago, claims that no longer hold. Correcting these costs little and removes the contradictions that make a model hedge or stay quiet.
03
Make the entity unambiguous
We agree one plain description of the business and put it where it can be found: the homepage, the about page, the profiles, the markup. If you share a name with something better known, this is where we do the work of separating you from it.
04
Format answers to be liftable
Then I go through the pages that matter and make each one answer its own question near the top, in a couple of sentences that stand alone. Headings become questions where that is natural. Nothing here hurts a human reader, which is the point.
05
Add structured data where it applies
Markup goes on the pages where it describes something real, and nowhere else. I validate it so it parses cleanly. I would rather have a small amount of accurate markup than a site covered in schema that argues with the visible content.
06
Earn corroborating mentions
What other sites say about you carries more weight than what you say about yourself. So we look for something genuinely worth referencing and where it might plausibly be picked up. This is the slowest part and the one I can promise least about.
07
Re-check and track drift
Models get updated and answers move without warning. So we re-run the same questions on a schedule, note what changed and decide whether it needs a response. Sometimes the honest answer is that nothing needs doing this month.
WHY ME
Why work with me on this
You work with me directly
The person who runs the checks is the person you talk to. Nothing is handed to a junior after the sales call, and nothing gets lost in translation between the two.
Decisions come from your own data
What we do is based on your pages, your search data and the answers assistants actually return for your questions. Not on a generic AEO checklist applied to every client in turn.
A prioritised plan, not a list of everything
You get an ordered list with the cheap, certain fixes at the top and the speculative work clearly marked as speculative. You can stop after the first section if that is all the budget allows.
You keep the deliverables
The question set, the recorded answers, the markup, the content and the notes are all yours. If you stop working with me, none of it walks out of the door.
I say when something will not help
This is a new field with a lot of confident nonsense attached to it. Where the mechanics are opaque, I say so. Where I think a piece of work is not worth your money, I say that too.
It fits with the rest of your SEO
I do not treat this as a separate product with its own strategy. The work sits alongside your technical and on-page SEO, so the same content is doing both jobs rather than competing with itself.
RESULTS
What you can reasonably expect
I will not put a percentage on results before seeing the site. On this service I will not promise placement in an AI answer at all, because nobody can. What follows is what the work actually produces.
- A consistent, accurate description of your business across assistants
- Key pages that carry a clean, quotable answer near the top
- Structured data that validates and matches the visible content
- Fewer contradictory facts about you sitting out in the wild
- Listings and profiles that agree with your own site
- One agreed source of truth for your core facts
- More featured snippet and answer-box opportunities in classic search too
- Question-led pages that match how people actually ask
- Clearer separation from brands with a similar name
- A repeatable way to check what assistants say about you
- A record of how those answers shift over time
- Content that reads better for humans in a hurry
How much each one moves depends on your starting point: how much is already written about you, how muddled your facts are, and how competitive your subject is. Assistants also change their behaviour without notice, so an answer that looks good this month may read differently next month through no fault of yours or mine. What I can say is that every item above is within our control, which is more than can be said for the citation itself.
TOOLING
What I use for this work
ChatGPT
Claude
Gemini
Google AI Studio
Perplexity AI
Google Search Console
Semrush
Ahrefs
Screaming Frog
Looker Studio
FAQ
Questions I get asked about AI search
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation and GEO for generative engine optimisation. In practice people use them interchangeably, and both describe the same thing: making sure your business is represented accurately when an AI system answers a question instead of listing links. The labels are new. Most of the underlying work is not.
No. Assistants are drawing on content that has been crawled, indexed and understood, so a site that fails at ordinary SEO fails here too. The overlap is large: clear structure, fast pages, accurate facts and content that answers the question all serve both. I treat AI search as an extra lens on the same work, not a replacement for it.
No, and nobody else can either. There is no ranking to buy, no submission form, and no reliable way to force a model to name you. Answers vary between users, between sessions and between model updates. What can be influenced is what exists about you, how clearly it is stated and how consistently it is repeated. Anyone promising placement is selling you something they do not control.
With a fixed set of questions, re-run on a schedule, with the answers recorded so you can compare them over time. Alongside that I track what can be measured properly: referral traffic from assistants where analytics picks it up, snippet and answer-box visibility in classic search, and whether your structured data validates. It is a rougher measurement than rank tracking and I will not dress it up as more.
Not on its own. Schema does not compel anyone to quote you. What it does is state your facts in a form that cannot be misread and back up what the page already says, which removes ambiguity. It is worth doing where it genuinely describes something, and a waste of effort where it is bolted on for the sake of it.
I think so, with a caveat. The share of people asking assistants rather than searching is still growing, and how much it matters varies a lot by industry. But almost everything on this page also improves ordinary search performance, so you are not betting on AI search taking over. If someone is asking you to fund work that only pays off if assistants replace Google, be careful.
It varies, and anyone giving you an exact date is guessing. Corrections to your own pages and profiles can be made quickly, but they have to be re-crawled before anything downstream can change, and model behaviour shifts on its own schedule. Earning third-party mentions is slower still. I would rather tell you that than invent a timeline to close a deal.
Yes. I can run the visibility checks, the fact audit and the content and markup work behind your brand, and deliver it in a form you can pass on to your client. You keep the relationship and the reporting. I am happy to join a client call if it helps, or to stay entirely in the background.
RELATED SERVICES
On-Page SEO
The page-level work that makes content clear enough to be quoted in the first place: titles, headings, structure and copy that answers the question.
Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, speed and structured data. If your pages cannot be reached and read reliably, none of the AI search work has anything to stand on.
SEO Consulting
A wider look at where your search visibility is going, so AI search sits inside a plan rather than becoming a side project nobody maintains.
Local SEO
Listings, Google Business Profile and consistent business details, which is exactly the ground that entity clarity and fact consistency depend on.
Find out what AI assistants currently say about your business
Send me your site and I will ask a few assistants about your market, record how they describe you, and tell you where the gaps and contradictions are. You will get a plain summary of what is wrong, what is worth fixing first and what I think is not worth your money. No obligation.