Get your business named when customers ask AI who to hire.
More of your customers now skip the list of links and ask ChatGPT, Google's AI or Perplexity straight out: who is the best plumber near me, which dentist takes new patients, who can fix this today. The answer comes back with two or three names. Answer engine optimization is the work of making sure yours is one of them, and that what the AI says about you is true.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making a business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and recommend. It covers three things: whether AI crawlers can read your website, whether your pages answer the questions buyers ask in plain sentences, and whether the rest of the internet agrees with what your site says about you.
You will also see it called generative engine optimization (GEO) or AI search optimization. Same job, different label. It sits on top of SEO rather than replacing it, because these assistants search the web before they answer. Google's AI answers draw on Google's own index, and ChatGPT's search leans on third-party indexes, Bing's among them. A business that search engines cannot find rarely gets recommended by AI either.
What I do
- Check what AI says about you today. I put the questions your customers actually ask to ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity and Claude, and record who gets named, which sites get cited, and whether anything said about you is wrong. That is the baseline everything else gets measured against.
- Make sure AI crawlers can read your site. Robots rules, firewall and CDN settings that quietly turn AI bots away, pages that only show their text after JavaScript runs, and missing sitemaps. It is the cheapest fix on this list and the one most often overlooked.
- Get you into the indexes the answers come from. Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow, set up so new and updated pages get picked up quickly instead of whenever a crawler happens to wander past.
- Structured data that states the facts plainly. Your business, services, service area, opening hours, FAQs and reviews, written as schema markup so machines read the facts instead of guessing them.
- Pages that answer the questions buyers ask. Key pages rewritten so each answer comes first and makes sense on its own, plus new pages for the questions you show up nowhere for today. An AI quotes the clearest answer it can find, so the job is to make yours the clearest.
- Your business described the same way everywhere. Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and the directories that matter in your trade, all with one name, one description and one set of contact details. Conflicting listings are how an AI ends up describing the wrong business.
- The before and after. Once the changes have had time to be picked up, I put the same questions to the same assistants again, so you can see what moved and what did not.
I do it to my own site first
Everything on that list runs on this website, and you can check it yourself. The robots.txt file lets every major AI crawler in. The llms.txt file gives AI systems a plain summary of the business. Every page carries structured data, and every article opens each section with a direct answer. The guide to getting recommended by ChatGPT on the blog walks through the same method if you would rather do it yourself.
What I cannot promise
Nobody controls what an AI says. Anyone who guarantees you a spot in ChatGPT's answer is guessing, or hoping you will not check. What I can do is remove every reason it has to skip you.
Some of the weight sits outside your website entirely. Reviews and mentions on other sites count for a lot, especially for local searches, and those take time and your customers' help. I can set up the system that asks every happy customer for a review, but I cannot write the reviews for you, and I will not.
Who it is for
Businesses whose customers compare before they buy and pick from a short list of names. Trades, clinics, law firms, agencies, consultants and local services. If being on the list is how you win the work, this is the job of getting on the list.
It is not worth it yet if almost all your work comes from referrals and repeat customers. In that case the money is better spent answering every call and following up every lead, and I will tell you so on the audit call rather than sell you this.
Common questions
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO gets your page into a list of links. AEO gets your business into the answer itself. They share the same foundations, like pages search engines can read and a clear structure, so good AEO work usually helps your SEO too. The difference is the goal: being named and quoted, not only being clicked.
How long does AEO take to work?
Technical fixes count as soon as the crawlers come back, which can be days. Content and listings take longer, because AI systems have to re-read your site and the sites that mention you. Expect weeks before the first movement and months for the full effect. Be wary of anyone who promises faster.
Can you guarantee my business shows up in ChatGPT?
No, and nobody honestly can. AI answers change from one question to the next, and two people asking the same thing can get different names. What I can do is remove every reason an AI has to skip you, and show you the before and after on the questions that matter to your business.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
It does no harm and takes ten minutes, so I add one. But so far no major AI search engine has said it uses the file to decide who to recommend, so it is not the lever. Crawler access, clear answers and consistent listings matter far more.
How much does AEO cost?
It depends on the size of your site and how much needs fixing. You get one fixed price before I start, and you pay it when the work is done. No monthly retainer, no hourly billing. The free audit is where you get a real number for your business.