What is AI search optimisation (AEO)?

It is the practice of making a website easy for AI assistants to crawl, interpret, trust and cite when they answer a question. It is also called answer engine optimisation (AEO) or generative engine optimisation (GEO). It shares foundations with SEO but places more weight on clear structure, unambiguous facts about your business, and third-party sources those systems already rely on.

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ai/assistant

Be one of the three names the assistant gives

Q: How do I know if AI assistants are recommending my business?

Two ways. Ask them, systematically and repeatedly, using the questions your customers would ask, and record what comes back. Then check your analytics for referral traffic from AI assistants, which can be isolated once tracking is configured to identify it.

People increasingly ask an AI rather than scanning ten blue links. The answer names two or three suppliers. Everyone else is not ranked lower — they are simply absent.

Check my AI visibility

Why assistants pick some businesses and not others

An assistant answering a live question fetches pages, extracts what it can parse, and prefers claims it can corroborate somewhere else. That produces a fairly consistent set of advantages:

Pages that can be crawled and read without JavaScript standing in the way.
Facts stated plainly and in one place — what you sell, where you operate, what it costs, who it suits.
Structured data that removes any ambiguity about what the business and the page are.
A consistent identity across the web, so the business is recognised as one entity rather than several.
Independent mentions on sources the model already leans on — directories, trade press, review platforms, forums.
Content that directly answers the question asked, rather than circling it for four hundred words first.

scope

What the work covers

Visibility baseline

A structured test of how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews currently answer the questions your buyers ask — including who they name instead of you.

Crawler access

Auditing robots rules, firewall and CDN blocks so that retrieval crawlers can reach your pages, with deliberate decisions about which AI crawlers to allow.

Structured data and entities

Schema markup for the organisation, its services, products, FAQs and articles, plus consistent details wherever your business is listed elsewhere.

Content for extraction

Rewriting key pages so answers come first: clear definitions, direct question-and-answer sections, specific figures and comparisons a model can lift cleanly.

Third-party citations

Identifying the sources assistants keep quoting in your market, and working to get you accurately represented on them.

Monitoring and measurement

Repeat testing on a schedule, plus analytics configured to separate AI referral traffic so the commercial effect is visible rather than assumed.

honest framing

What nobody can promise

There is no submission form for AI assistants and no ranking dial to turn. Outputs vary between users and change without notice as models are updated. What can be done is to remove every reason a system would skip you, make your facts easy to lift and verify, and measure the result over time instead of relying on a single flattering screenshot. Anyone quoting guaranteed placement in AI answers is describing something that does not exist.

Get a visibility check

questions

AI search questions I get asked

What is AI search optimisation?

It is the practice of making a website easy for AI assistants to crawl, interpret, trust and cite when answering a question. It also goes by answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO). It shares foundations with SEO, but weights clear structure, unambiguous facts and credible third-party sources more heavily.

How do I know if AI assistants are recommending my business?

Two ways. Ask them systematically and repeatedly, using the questions your customers would use, and record what comes back over time. Then look at referral traffic from AI assistants in your analytics, which can be isolated once tracking is configured to identify it.

Should I block AI crawlers from my website?

It depends on whether your content is the product. Publishers may want to restrict training crawlers while still allowing the retrieval crawlers that fetch pages to answer live questions — the two are separate and can be controlled separately. For most businesses selling goods or services, blocking is a way to become invisible.

Is this just SEO with a new name?

It rests on the same foundations, and a site with poor technical SEO will not do well here either. The differences are real, though: no ten-result page to climb, far more weight on corroboration from other sources, and a much harder measurement problem.