Both kinds of search visibility, from one team. Classic SEO for Google's blue links, AEO for the AI answer engines that increasingly mediate them.
For twenty years, organic search visibility meant one thing: ranking in Google's blue links. That is now half the story. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot and Google's own AI Overviews increasingly answer queries directly, citing a small handful of sources rather than presenting ten.
Being one of those cited sources is a different game. It rewards entity authority, machine-readable structure, well-scoped answers to specific questions, and crawlability by a new generation of AI bots. We call it Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO.
The two disciplines overlap heavily but they are not the same. We do both, because our clients need both.
of clicks still go to the first five organic results
answer engines now mediate a growing share of informational queries. Being cited is the new being ranked.
The short version, before we get into how we do it.
AEO is the practice of getting your content selected, cited, and quoted by AI answer engines. When a user asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google's AI Overview a question, the system synthesises an answer from a small set of sources. AEO is how you become one of those sources.
It matters because AI-mediated queries are growing fast, and because being the cited source is the only way to be "above the fold" in an AI answer. AI compresses ten ranked results into a handful of brand mentions and a citation list. Being cited is the new being ranked.
The good news is that classic SEO foundations carry over directly. Clean technical architecture, authoritative content, and trustworthy backlinks feed both. AEO adds new requirements on top: structured answer formats, explicit entity disambiguation, AI-bot crawlability, and a different way of measuring success (brand mentions inside AI answers, not just keyword rankings).
Everything you need to win in classic search and in AI answer engines, handled by one connected team.
The foundation for both classic search and AEO. We audit and optimise the technical elements that determine how well search engines and AI crawlers can discover, render, and use your content.
Content that ranks in classic search AND gets cited by AI answer engines. We develop content strategies based on search demand data, AI query patterns, competitive analysis, and your commercial priorities.
AI answer engines do not just rank pages, they rank entities. Consistent mentions across the web from trustworthy sources are what make an AI confident enough to cite you. This is the genuinely new AEO discipline.
Building site authority through high-quality, relevant backlinks. Still the strongest signal of trust for classic search, and a major input to the entity authority that AI systems rely on.
A structured, transparent process from full audit through to ongoing optimisation and reporting on both classic and AI surfaces.
Technical health, content performance, backlink profile, AI-bot crawlability, entity authority, and current AI citation patterns for your priority queries.
A prioritised roadmap based on impact and effort, with clear KPIs for both classic rankings and AI brand-mention coverage.
Our team gets it done: technical fixes, content production, schema work, outreach campaigns, AI-bot rule configuration.
Monthly reporting on rankings, traffic, conversions AND on AI citations: which assistants are citing you, for which queries, against which competitors.
The short answers. Get in touch for the longer ones.
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It is the practice of getting your content selected, cited, and quoted by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews. Where classic SEO ranks pages in a list of blue links, AEO gets your brand named in an AI-generated answer.
AEO and SEO overlap heavily. The same technical foundations (crawlability, structured data, authoritative content, trustworthy backlinks) feed both. AEO adds new requirements on top: AI-bot crawlability rules in robots.txt, explicit question-and-answer content structure, entity disambiguation, and brand-mention tracking inside AI answers. We treat them as one connected discipline.
The ones your customers actually use. For most UK businesses that means ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude. Getting cited consistently by one usually correlates with the others, because they rely on similar signals: entity authority, structured data, and clear question-answer content.
Manually, you can ask the AI assistants the queries you care about and see whether you appear in the citation list. Systematically, we use brand-mention tracking that queries the major AI engines on a schedule for your target prompts and logs when your domain or brand name appears. We set this up as part of the engagement.
If you want to be cited in AI answers, yes. Major AI crawlers include GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, and CCBot. These are configured separately from classic search bots in your robots.txt. We audit and configure those rules as part of any AEO engagement, weighing visibility against the legitimate reasons some publishers choose to block.
Faster than classic SEO, often weeks rather than months. AI answer engines update their citation patterns continuously. New, well-structured, authoritative content on a site with reasonable existing authority can start appearing in AI answers within four to eight weeks. Building deeper entity authority takes longer.