Answer Engine Optimisation for businesses whose customers are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews before they ever see a list of blue links.
A monthly retainer that restructures the site you already have so AI search engines actually quote you when somebody asks about your category. No new platform. No rebuild. Just the structural and editorial work that makes a page legible to a machine reading it on someone else’s behalf.
A growing slice of search now ends before the click. A buyer types a question. Google answers it at the top of the page, in its own words, sourced from a handful of pages it found legible — and then offers the blue links underneath as a courtesy. Perplexity and ChatGPT do the same thing more aggressively.
The pages that get cited up there aren’t always the ones ranking number one in the old sense. They’re the ones that answered the question cleanly: a clear heading, a direct answer near the top, structured data underneath, and no marketing copy in the way. Most sites — including most well-optimised SEO sites — aren’t built that way.
AEO is the work of fixing that. Not a rewrite. A restructuring. We take the pages your buyers actually arrive at, find the questions they’re actually asking, and reshape the answers so a machine reading on their behalf can quote you with confidence. The pages stay yours; they just become quotable.
AEO isn’t finished work. AI search engines change what they cite, often. The retainer is a small, steady amount of the right work each month — not a thick deck once and silence afterwards.
Month one is groundwork. I do a full AI-citation audit of the site — which pages are already being quoted, which ones should be, and which are invisible to the machines doing the quoting. Alongside that, I collect the real questions your buyers ask, from your inbox, your support tickets, and the “people also ask” boxes around your category. By the end of the month you have a written baseline and a prioritised list of pages to rework.
Month two is structural work. The pages we agreed on get reshaped: question-shaped headings, direct answers near the top, FAQ blocks at the bottom, the underlying structured data that tells a machine what the page actually says. I do the editing inside your CMS — or alongside your team if they prefer to make the changes themselves — and walk you through every decision.
Month three onwards is cadence. Two to three pages reworked each month, new questions caught early, citation pickups tracked in the report, the small ongoing work of staying quotable as the AI engines change their minds about what they cite. Nothing dramatic; just monthly, on time, by the same person.
Throughout is a short monthly report — one page, no jargon — on what was done, what got cited, and what to do next. Three meetings a quarter is plenty. Email and a shared doc handle the rest. No agency dashboards nobody opens.
AEO earns its keep where your audience already turns to AI first. Three signals of fit, in roughly the order they show up.
— A / Watching organic decline
Impressions are holding or growing in Search Console; clicks are quietly down 15–30% year on year; the gap is bigger on informational queries than on transactional ones. That’s AI Overviews doing the answering. The traffic isn’t gone — it’s being intercepted. AEO is how you become the source it’s being intercepted from.
— B / Expert-led consultancies
Solicitors, accountants, planners, financial advisers, surveyors. Buyers don’t search for your firm; they search for an answer, and decide who to call based on who clearly knows the answer. Being the cited authority in an AI Overview does for 2026 what page-one used to do for 2018.
— C / Question-heavy categories
Care, hospice planning, complex insurance, vocational training, second-hand industrial kit, regulated trade. Anywhere a buyer’s first move is “explain this to me like I’m new.” If ChatGPT and Perplexity are already answering those questions, AEO is how you become the answer they cite.
Step one · Listen
Every cycle starts with the actual questions your buyers asked this month — from sales emails, support tickets, Perplexity searches, and the “people also ask” box around your category. Not the questions a strategist guesses; the questions buyers wrote down.
Step two · Audit
I check each question against Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, and ChatGPT, and record who’s being quoted. Sometimes it’s you. Often it’s a competitor, a forum thread, or a wholesale answer scraped from somewhere unrelated. We work the gaps.
Step three · Restructure
Pick the two or three highest-leverage pages this month. Reshape them so the answer is at the top, the structure is legible to a machine, and the underlying data tells a search engine exactly what the page says. No rewrites for their own sake; just the edits that change the citation outcome.
Step four · Track
Citations earned, citations lost, queries where you’re still invisible. Recorded in a single short report and used as the input to next month’s “Listen” step. The work is steady, not seasonal, and shows up the same week every month.
“Three families in a row mentioned they’d ‘asked ChatGPT’ and been pointed at us. That used to be Google’s job.”
Helen Fairhurst
Operations Director, Attivo Care
If yours isn’t here, send it to rich@flexiweb.digital and I’ll reply within a working day.
SEO is the broad practice of being findable on a list of blue links. AEO is the focused subset that decides whether you’re cited inside the answer a machine writes above those links. The two overlap heavily — good AEO needs good technical SEO underneath — but their priorities diverge. SEO optimises for being clicked; AEO optimises for being quoted.
If you already have an SEO partner doing solid technical work, AEO sits cleanly alongside them. If you don’t, my SEO consulting engagement covers the broader package with an AEO baseline included.
Three things, more or less in order: a page that answers a specific question clearly and near the top; structured data (FAQ schema, HowTo schema, a clean llms.txt where it helps) telling the machine what the page is; and enough underlying authority — topical depth, internal linking, real citations from elsewhere — that the AI engine trusts you on the subject.
None of the three is exotic. What’s exotic is doing all three on the same page, on the questions buyers actually ask, before competitors do.
Three measurable things, in order of how much I weight them: the number of commercial queries on which you’re cited by Google AI Overviews or Perplexity; the share of organic clicks coming from longer, question-shaped searches; and inbound enquiries that mention an AI engine as the source. The last one is the slowest signal but the most honest one.
What I don’t pretend to track is rankings on the old ten-blue-links view, because for most queries that’s no longer where the visible action is.
First citations typically arrive 4–10 weeks after the structural work lands — faster than classic SEO, partly because AI engines reindex more aggressively and partly because they reward clarity over backlinks. A meaningful share of category queries usually takes a full quarter to move.
If a site has serious technical debt — a page builder rendering everything in JavaScript, no schema, a sitemap nobody updates — we fix that first and the citation work follows. I’ll tell you in the audit which group you’re in.
On the rebuild: rarely. The work happens inside whatever CMS you’re already on — WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, a static site. We only recommend a rebuild when the underlying platform is genuinely blocking the work, and we’ll say so plainly if it is.
On doing it yourselves: yes, you can. The audit and the questions inventory are the hardest bits to do without practice; the editorial work itself is well within reach of a careful in-house marketer. Some clients hire me for three months to set the baseline, then run it themselves with a quarterly review — which is fine, and arguably the point of getting properly explained how it works.
Tell me what you sell and roughly who buys it. I’ll run 25 buyer-shaped queries against Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, record who’s being quoted on each, and send back a short written read on where you stand — and what it would take to be the cited answer. No deck, no obligation.