When AI answers, it names two or three businesses. We get you into that answer.

What is Answer Engine Optimization?

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the work of getting a business named in the answers that AI assistants give, ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot. Where SEO competes for a place in a list of links, AEO competes to be one of the handful of businesses an assistant mentions when it answers the question outright.

An assistant doesn't rank you, it reads you. So it comes down to three things: whether it can reach your site at all, whether it can make sense of what it finds, and whether anything outside your own website backs up what you're claiming.

Most businesses fall down on the first two, and for dull mechanical reasons, a line in a file nobody's opened in years, a site that only assembles itself once JavaScript runs. Nothing to do with how good the business is. They just never find out.

Who is it for?

Better to say that now than take your money for a year.

What's included

How we run it

1. Weeks 1–2, Baseline

   We record what the assistants say about you before we touch anything. Skip this and there’s no way to prove any of it worked.

2. Weeks 3–4, Access and structure

   Crawlers, rendering, schema. Unglamorous, and usually where the actual problem turns out to be.

3. Weeks 5–8, Content

   The pages that answer what your customers ask, written to be quoted rather than skimmed.

4. Then, every month

   We measure again. Same prompts, same format. You’ll see the number move, and when it doesn’t you’ll hear that from us first, along with what we’re changing about it.

AEO vs. the alternatives

Does AEO replace SEO? No, and be wary of anyone telling you it does.

Assistants lean heavily on sites that already rank and are already trusted, so good SEO is what makes you eligible to get cited at all. AEO is what makes you quotable once you are. Run one without the other and you've either got authority nothing can read, or tidy markup on a site nobody trusts yet.

How long does it take?

The mechanical side can change what assistants see within a couple of weeks of a re-crawl, sometimes faster, if the thing in the way was one line in a file. Content and entity work is slower. A few months before the trend is clear enough to make decisions on.

What we won't give you is a percentage. AI answers shift with phrasing, with the person asking, with which version of the model happens to be running. Anyone promising you a guaranteed lift is quoting a number they invented. What we do instead: fix the baseline on day one, run the same prompts every month, and show you the movement, including the months there isn't any.

How is it priced?

One flat monthly fee, quoted before we start. No commission, no hourly billing. The baseline audit is in month one, and the monthly re-measure stays included for as long as you're with us.

And if you only want to know where you stand, the AI Visibility Report is free. Take it and do the work yourself if you'd rather, we'll still tell you how.

Half an hour with a marketing director. We'll run your baseline live, show you which assistants name you and which name somebody else, and give you an exact monthly number.

Frequently asked.

The practical effect.

Being named in an AI answer isn't equivalent to a click, and it's worth being clear about what it produces.

Often the assistant answers the question outright and the user never visits a site. What you get is the recommendation itself, your name given, in context, as the business to call. For a local service business that frequently converts to a direct search or a phone call rather than a session in your analytics.

Which means the measurement is indirect: branded search volume, direct traffic, and callers who say they were recommended. We track those alongside the mention data rather than pretending the citation itself is a click.

Where a citation does carry a link, it tends to be high-intent traffic, someone who asked a specific question and was pointed at you as the answer.

The honest summary is that this behaves more like a referral channel than a search channel, and it should be judged the way referrals are.

The parts you genuinely can.

A meaningful share of what we'd fix is available to anyone willing to spend an afternoon on it, and it's worth naming rather than obscuring.

Check robots.txt for lines blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. This is the single most common cause of invisibility and it's usually one line, often added years ago for an unrelated reason.

Put your services, service area, hours and phone number in plain text rather than in images or sliders. If it can't be selected with a cursor, most crawlers can't read it.

Add an FAQ section answering the questions customers actually ask, with the answer in the first sentence. That's the passage shape assistants extract.

What's harder to do alone is the measurement, running a consistent prompt set repeatedly and comparing it over time, and the entity and citation work outside your own site. That's most of what you'd be paying us for.

Plainly.

One flat monthly fee, quoted before we start, with the baseline audit included in month one and the monthly re-measure included for as long as you're with us. No commission, no hourly billing, no separate setup fee.

Where AEO is bought alongside local SEO or content, which is the common case, because they share most of the underlying work, it's the same single fee rather than a second retainer.

The AI Visibility Report is free and always will be. Run it, take the findings, and do the work yourself if you'd rather; we'll still tell you how.

Month to month with 30 days' notice. AEO does take months to compound and we'll say so plainly, but you're never contractually locked in while it does.

And everything produced is yours, the schema, the content, the technical work, the baseline data. If you leave, it stays on your site working.

What the first month looks like.

Week one is the baseline: a prompt set built from your services and your city, run against the assistants, with every answer stored verbatim. Nothing is changed before this exists.

Week two is access and structure, crawler permissions, rendering, and the schema that lets an assistant state your facts rather than infer them. This is where most of the early movement comes from.

Weeks three and four are content: the pages that answer your customers' actual questions, restructured so the answer comes first.

At the end of the month the same prompts run again and you see the comparison. Sometimes it's moved by then and sometimes it hasn't, and we'll show you either way.

Month to month, 30 days' notice, and everything produced stays on your site if you leave.

Five stars on Google. Every single one.

Smashburger · TRAX Analytics · Design Source · R2 Medical Clinic · Accendo Wellness · Roof Evolution · Pink Flamingo Lawn Services · Shield Funding · The Rail Yard · Turf Surgeons · Beltranscapes · NuIQ · Techniques Hair Shop · WideBase · Magnolia & Mint · Shelf Love · Station 6 Over 9 · YOLO TOLO · Doggy Dog World Rescue · Roundtable Labs · Juicy Marketing · Events @ Piney Creek · Estevez Realtor · The Situation Room

Find out which assistants name you

Half an hour with a marketing director. We'll run your baseline live, show you which assistants name you and which name somebody else, and give you an exact monthly number.