Answer engine optimization
Answer engine optimization, as a service.
Your buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews before they ask you. We do the work that gets you cited in those answers, and we report every month on whether it is working. It is the same discipline behind Be the Answer, our AI-search visibility program, and we run it on our own site first.
Three names. One discipline.
The market has settled on three labels for winning search, and they overlap far more than the vendors admit. SEO earned you the blue link, GEO earns you a place inside the answer an AI assembles, and AEO is what buyers call the service that gets you both, measured month by month.
- SEO, search engine optimization. Be the result the engine lists when someone still scrolls a page of links.
- GEO, generative engine optimization. Be the source the engine quotes when it writes the answer itself.
- AEO, answer engine optimization. The service that makes both happen for the questions your buyers actually ask.
We treat the three as one program because the engines draw on the same signals: structure they can read, an entity they can trust, and answers worth quoting. The label matters less than the citation.
What the service includes
- Visibility audit. Where you stand today across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews: what the engines say about you and your category, and which competitor is being cited for the questions you should own.
- Entity and schema groundwork. The structured data and entity signals that let engines read you as a source worth quoting, page by page.
- Citable answer content. Pages written to be quoted: direct answers with the evidence attached, in the shape engines lift.
- Third-party corroboration. Engines weigh what others publish about you, so we build the off-site mentions and citations that back your claims up.
- Monthly share-of-answer measurement. Every month we run the buying questions in your category and report which engines cite you, where you gained, and where a competitor took the slot.
Who this is for
Firms whose buyers research before they ever make contact: B2B services, retailers, brands with a considered purchase. If your customers arrive already knowing who they will call, this work decides whose name they heard. It also fits teams watching organic clicks erode under AI Overviews while the analytics dashboard still calls it seasonality.
If you want the method before the conversation, our guide on how to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews walks through the playbook we use, including the metrics that lie. And if you are mapping the discipline itself, start with LLM SEO: how to rank in AI answers.
How an engagement starts, and why us
It starts with a working session. No gated forms, no discovery deck. You bring the questions your buyers ask; we show you live what the engines answer today and who they cite. From there we scope the audit and the monthly loop.
We sell this because we practice it. We rank our own site, and the page you are reading is part of that proof. We led the defense against the AI-Overviews collapse inside a PE-backed fintech with tens of millions of annual visits, at executive-committee level, and we grew a small joinery company in Haute-Savoie to more revenue in three months than it had made in the previous year, through search and GEO. The full program is Be the Answer; this page is what it looks like as a service you can buy.
Questions, answered straight.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of making your company the answer that engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews give and cite when buyers ask questions in your category. In practice it covers structured data and entity signals, content written to be quoted, third-party corroboration, and measurement of how often the engines actually cite you.
What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
Three names, one discipline. SEO earns you a place in a list of ranked links. GEO, generative engine optimization, earns you a place inside the answer an AI assembles. AEO is the same work packaged as a service: the audit, the content, the corroboration and the monthly measurement. We run all of it as one program, because the engines draw on the same signals.
How long before answer engine optimization shows results?
The groundwork, schema and entity fixes, shows up once the engines recrawl you. Earning citations for competitive buying questions builds over months, through content and corroboration. We report your share of answer monthly from the first month, so you watch it move instead of waiting for a reveal at the end.
How do you measure answer engine visibility?
We keep a set of real buying questions for your category, run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on a fixed cycle, and record who each engine cites and recommends. The monthly report shows your share of those answers, who holds the rest, and what we changed since the last one.
Can you guarantee citations in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews?
No. The engines decide what they cite, and that decision is not for sale. What we commit to is the full set of inputs the engines reward: readable structure, entity clarity, answers worth quoting, corroboration from third parties, and an honest monthly measure of whether your share is moving.
Hear what the engines say about you.
A working session on your AI visibility, with the people who would do the work.