Answer Engine Optimisation
Be the source AI cites when your customers ask.
When prospects research a purchase or evaluate a vendor, they increasingly start with ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews rather than a traditional search engine results page. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the discipline of being the source those AI engines cite, recommend or quote in their answers. We offer AEO as a discrete service: an initial audit followed by an ongoing retainer, chargeable separately rather than bundled into a generic SEO engagement.
Why AEO is now its own discipline
The buyer journey has changed. Many prospects who would once have run a Google search and clicked through three or four blue links now pose the same question to an AI assistant and read a single synthesised answer that cites two or three sources. The brand whose product is named in that answer wins the consideration; the brands not mentioned often do not get a second look.
The techniques that make a website rank well in traditional search are necessary but no longer sufficient. AEO extends those foundations with content quality and structure tuned for AI consumption, schema strategy that AI parsers can actually use, brand-presence work that gets the company described accurately in training data and live retrievals, and ongoing monitoring of how the major AI engines describe the brand against its competitors.
The discipline is now enterprise-funded. Adobe's $1.9 billion acquisition of Semrush, which we covered in our post on the deal, put the strategic question on the record: AEO is no longer experimental, and treating it as separable from SEO is no longer credible.
What We Offer
AEO Audit
A comprehensive review of how the major AI engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) currently describe your brand against competitors, with a prioritised plan for moving from where you are to where you want to be.
Schema & Structured Data
Schema markup tuned for AI consumption: Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article, Review, How-To and the rest, applied where they earn their keep rather than as a blanket layer.
Content & Citation Strategy
Content rewriting and structuring so AI engines can extract clear, citation-ready answers from your pages: clear claims, verifiable facts, properly attributed sources.
Robots.txt & AI Bot Configuration
Explicit allow-listing for AI search crawlers (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ChatGPT-User, Claude-User, Perplexity-User), plus considered policy on the AI training crawlers.
Brand-Presence Monitoring
Ongoing measurement of citation frequency, accuracy and competitive positioning across the major AI engines, using Semrush and Ahrefs alongside specialist tools where they add signal.
Knowledge-Graph & Wikipedia
Where the brief warrants, work on the structured-data sources AI engines draw on for ground-truth facts: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Crunchbase, the Knowledge Graph itself.
How We Do It
Where do you stand today? We measure your current citation rate across the major AI engines, the accuracy of how you are being described, and the structural and content gaps that explain the result.
Hand-coded improvements where they earn their keep: schema markup, content restructuring, robots.txt and bot configuration, internal linking that AI parsers can follow.
Brand presence in the structured-data sources AI engines draw on, content updates that target the queries your buyers are actually asking, and signal-building work for your topical authority.
Monthly measurement of citation frequency and accuracy, comparison against competitors, and ongoing refinement based on how the AI engines' behaviour evolves.
Case Study: Warwick Hall Cars
Our anchor AEO engagement is with Warwick Hall Cars, the Hyde-based dealership we have built and host both the website and dealership-management system for since around 2020. The AEO retainer is a separate, more recent stream alongside that long-running technical relationship.
After we restructured the dealership's schema and content for AI consumption, brand-presence audit results showed a marked increase in how often Warwick Hall Cars was being cited or recommended in AI assistant responses to relevant local-dealer queries. The AEO work continues; it is now part of how the dealership's online visibility is managed alongside traditional SEO and the operational website itself.
Tools We Use
Our default measurement stack is Semrush (now Adobe-owned) and Ahrefs, alongside the agency's own auditing tools. Specialist AEO platforms are under active evaluation for inclusion. We do not pretend any single tool tells the whole story; AEO is a younger discipline than SEO and the measurement landscape is still settling. That is part of why the first deliverable on every engagement is a baseline audit rather than a turnkey product.
Ready to be the source AI cites?
Contact us for a free AEO audit conversation. We will tell you whether the discipline applies to your business yet, what a realistic engagement scope looks like, and what your starting position is across the major AI engines.
Book a Call Request a Quote
Quickly, effortlessly & cost effectively upgrade your existing car dealer website, or launch a brand new car dealership website and you could save over £500 per year.
Serving Businesses Nationwide
Our services are available to businesses across the UK and internationally, including: London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, Bristol, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Oxford, Cambridge, Nottingham, Wrexham & Chester.
