Search
AI is answering your customers. Are you in the answer?
A growing number of people looking for a local business no longer scroll a page of links. They ask an assistant, read the answer, and act on it. If your name is not in that answer, the search finished without you.
Ranking and being quoted are different jobs
Traditional search rewards authority: links, age, reputation. Answer engines reward something narrower. They quote text that answers a specific question clearly and early, in language a machine can lift without ambiguity.
This is why a site can rank respectably and still never be cited. The page is optimised to be found, not to be quoted.
What actually gets quoted
Question-shaped headings, answered in the first sentence underneath. Not a build-up, not context first. The answer, then the detail.
Plain, factual sentences beat marketing copy, because marketing copy hedges and a machine cannot safely quote a hedge.
And consistency across everything about you: the same description of your business on your site, your Google profile and every directory. Assistants are trying to work out who you are, and contradictory descriptions read as uncertainty.
What does not work
There is no markup that makes an assistant cite you, whatever anyone sells you. Google said as much publicly. The work is the writing.
Why it is worth doing now
Because almost nobody in most local markets has bothered. The bar for being the business an assistant names is currently very low, and it will not stay that way.
Common questions
What is answer engine optimisation?
It is writing so that assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI overviews can find your answer, quote it, and name you as the source. Traditional SEO competes for a click. Answer engine optimisation competes to be the answer, whether or not a click follows.
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO aims at ranking a page in a list of links. AEO aims at being the passage an assistant lifts and repeats. That changes the writing: answers have to stand alone, because they get shown with none of the surrounding page.
How do I get my business mentioned by AI assistants?
Answer real questions plainly and in full on your own site, structure them so a machine can parse them, and keep the facts about your business consistent everywhere they appear. Assistants trust information that agrees with itself across sources.
Does answer engine optimisation replace SEO?
No. It sits on top of it. A page still has to be findable and credible to be quoted, so the work overlaps heavily. What changes is that being quoted without a click now counts as a win.