AEO Is the New SEO: How to Get Found by AI-Powered Search
Customers are asking ChatGPT and Google AI for recommendations. Answer Engine Optimization is how your business shows up in those answers — here's where to start.
Search behaviour has changed. A meaningful share of the people looking for what you sell are no longer typing keywords into a search box and comparing ten blue links. They are asking an assistant a question in plain language and acting on the answer it gives them.
That answer either mentions your business or it does not. Answer Engine Optimization is the work of making sure it can.
How this differs from traditional SEO
Classic SEO competes for position in a ranked list. A user sees several options and chooses. AI-generated answers usually name a small number of businesses, sometimes one, and the user often never sees the alternatives.
That changes what matters. Ranking eighth on a results page still gets you occasional clicks. Being the eighth-best match for an AI answer usually gets you nothing at all. The upside is that these systems care less about domain authority and more about whether your content clearly and verifiably answers the question.
Write pages that answer questions directly
Marketing copy that circles a topic for four paragraphs before saying anything concrete performs badly here. Language models extract answers, and they cannot extract an answer that is not stated.
Practical changes that help:
- Use the question as the heading, and answer it in the first sentence underneath
- State specifics — service areas, what is included, how long things take, what governs the price
- Publish real ranges rather than 'contact us for pricing' wherever you reasonably can
- Keep each page about one topic, so it is unambiguous what the page answers
- Put the answer before the persuasion, not after it
Make the facts machine-readable
Structured data is a standard way of labelling the facts on a page so software does not have to infer them from prose. Your address, opening hours, services, and reviews can all be marked up explicitly.
This has been good SEO practice for years. It matters more now, because an assistant assembling an answer will favour facts it can read unambiguously over facts it has to guess at from a paragraph.
Consistency across the wider web
These systems cross-check. If your address is one thing on your website, something slightly different in a directory, and a third variation on a review platform, that inconsistency reduces confidence in all three.
Auditing your business listings is unglamorous work with a real payoff. Name, address, phone number, and hours should be byte-identical everywhere they appear.
Being cited elsewhere still matters
Assistants draw on sources beyond your own website — directories, local press, industry sites, community forums. A business that appears in several credible places is easier to recommend confidently than one that appears only on its own domain.
This is not a reason to buy links. It is a reason to make sure the places that would naturally mention you actually do.
What not to do
- Do not abandon traditional SEO. Conventional search is still where most traffic comes from, and the fundamentals overlap heavily.
- Do not stuff pages with questions you do not answer. A page of headings with thin content underneath reads as low quality to every system evaluating it.
- Do not publish claims you cannot support. These systems increasingly cross-reference, and a claim contradicted elsewhere costs you more than it gains.
- Do not block the crawlers you want to be found by. Check what your robots file actually permits.
Where to start
Take your five most important pages. For each, write down the question a customer would ask that the page should answer, then check whether the page answers it in the first paragraph. Most do not. Fixing that is the highest-value AEO work available to most businesses.
If you want a hand, our web design and digital marketing team works on exactly this.
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