AI Search

What is AEO (answer engine optimization)?

AEO is the work of making your business the answer AI engines give — when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google's AI who to hire, what something costs, or whether a company is legitimate. Where classic SEO optimizes pages to rank in a list of links, AEO optimizes facts and passages to be quoted in a composed answer.

In practice it means: putting a direct, self-contained answer in the first screen of every important page; making every claim about your business verifiable against public records and listings; keeping your identity identical across Google, Bing, Yelp, Apple, and the registries engines cross-check; publishing structured data machines can read; and measuring with a fixed panel of questions month over month.

It rewards honesty structurally: engines cross-check, so only true, consistent claims survive. It is also measured differently from SEO: there is no ranking position to report, so the honest metric is whether you appear in the composed answer, and how accurately you are described when you do.

AI Search

The longer answer.

AEO and SEO aren't rivals — the foundation is shared. Fast, crawlable pages with real substance help both. The difference is emphasis: AEO cares less about keyword volume and more about whether a specific passage can be lifted whole into an answer, and whether the engine trusts your business enough to name it.

The measurement is different too. Rankings don't capture AI visibility — the honest metric is a fixed set of buyer questions asked to the engines on a schedule, scored for whether you're cited and whether the facts are right. That's how we track it for our own business and for clients.

Want the answer for YOUR business, not the general one?

The $75 audit reads your actual site, your actual listings, and what AI actually says about you — evidence included, yours to keep.

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