What is AEO, and why it matters more than your ranking
People stopped clicking ten blue links. They ask a machine and read the answer. Your site needs to be in that answer.
SEO got you onto page one. AEO, answer engine optimisation, gets you quoted when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews a question you should be the answer to.
The difference matters because behaviour changed. A growing share of searches now end without a click. The user asks, the engine answers, and nobody visits a site. If your content is not what the engine draws on, you are invisible in a way no ranking report will show you.
What answer engines actually reward
- Direct answers near the top of the page, not buried after 600 words of preamble
- Clear structure: one question per heading, one idea per paragraph
- Facts an engine can verify: numbers, names, dates, definitions
- Structured data (schema.org) that says what the page is about in machine terms
- Being cited elsewhere. Engines trust what other sources already trust
What it does not reward
Keyword stuffing, ten near-identical pages, and copy that could belong to any company in your industry. Engines are good at recognising text that says nothing, and they skip it.
How we do it
We start from the questions your customers actually ask, usually pulled from sales calls and support tickets, not from a keyword tool. Each one gets a page or a section that answers it plainly in the first two sentences, then earns depth. We add FAQ, Organization and Service schema so the engine does not have to guess. Then we check what the engines say when asked, and fix what they get wrong.
It is writing clearly for a reader who happens to be a machine first and a person second.
If that is your week too, thirty minutes is enough to find out.
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