AEO in one paragraph
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of making your business visible and accurately represented in AI search engines. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google AI Overviews to recommend a business in your category, the engine names three to five. AEO determines whether you are one of them. The unit of value is a citation (being named in the answer), not a click to your website.
How AI engines decide who to recommend
AI engines do not rank websites the way Google does. They synthesise information from multiple sources and produce a recommendation. The signals they weight include:
Authority signals. How often your business is mentioned across authoritative sources: industry directories, review platforms, news articles, and other websites. The more consistent and frequent these mentions, the more likely an AI engine is to recognise your business as a credible option.
Structured data. Schema markup on your website tells AI engines exactly what your business does, where it operates, and what services it offers. Without structured data, the engine has to guess from unstructured text, which it does poorly.
Content depth. AI engines favour sources that provide comprehensive, specific information over thin pages with generic descriptions. A 2,000-word service page with detailed methodology beats a 200-word overview.
Entity recognition. When your business is recognised as a distinct entity (not just a name in a paragraph), AI engines can connect it to related concepts: your sector, your location, your services, your founder. This is why structured data, consistent naming, and third-party profiles matter.
Third-party consistency. If your Google Business Profile says you are a “web design agency”, your website says “digital marketing consultancy”, and your LinkedIn says “creative studio”, AI engines cannot resolve what you actually do. Consistency across platforms strengthens citation likelihood.
The 25% problem
Research on AI citation patterns shows that even if your website ranks in Google’s top 10 for a query, you only have approximately a 25% chance of being cited in the AI answer for the same query.
This means 75% of businesses with strong Google rankings are invisible in AI search. The reverse is also true: some businesses with weaker Google rankings appear frequently in AI answers because their content and authority signals are structured in ways AI engines can read.
This gap is the core argument for AEO as a distinct discipline, not just an extension of traditional SEO.
The four engines that matter for UK businesses
ChatGPT (including GPT-4o with web browsing). The largest general-purpose AI engine. When users ask for business recommendations, ChatGPT draws from its training data, web search results, and structured information. It is the engine where most UK businesses are first discovered or first missed.
Perplexity. A search-first AI engine that always cites its sources with links. More transparent than ChatGPT about where its answers come from. Growing rapidly among users who want verifiable AI answers.
Claude (Anthropic). Used by a growing segment of professionals and businesses. Different training data and different weighting of authority signals compared to ChatGPT, which means your citation rate varies across engines.
Google AI Overviews. Google’s own AI-generated answers that appear above traditional search results. Because they are embedded in Google Search, they reach the largest audience. They pull heavily from Google’s own index, which means strong traditional SEO helps here more than with the other three engines.
Each engine weights signals differently. This is why a structured audit across all four is essential rather than spot-checking one engine and assuming the rest follow.
What AEO is NOT
It is not prompt engineering for your website. You cannot game AI engines by writing content that “tricks” them into recommending you. They synthesise from multiple sources; your website is one input among many.
It is not a replacement for SEO. AEO and traditional SEO are complementary. SEO drives visibility in Google’s ranked results. AEO drives visibility in AI-generated answers. Dropping SEO for AEO would be like dropping your phone number because you have an email address.
It is not a one-time fix. AI engines update their models, re-crawl sources, and change their weighting of signals. A citation you have today can disappear tomorrow if a competitor improves their authority signals or your information becomes stale. Ongoing measurement is required.
How to measure AEO
The measurement framework for AEO is different from SEO:
Citation rate. The percentage of relevant buyer queries where your business is named in the AI answer. Run 12 queries per engine, 4 engines, 48 probes total. Your citation rate is the percentage where you appear.
Citation accuracy. Is the AI engine saying the right things about your business? Inaccurate citations (wrong services, wrong location, outdated information) can be worse than no citation at all.
Citation position. When your business is named, where in the answer does it appear? First, second, or buried at the end? Position correlates with the user’s likelihood of acting on the recommendation.
Citation sentiment. Is the AI engine recommending your business positively, neutrally, or with caveats? This matters more than it does in traditional SEO, where the search result is just a link.
A Visibility Briefing measures all four of these across all four major AI engines, giving you a baseline before any optimisation work begins.
For a deeper comparison of how AEO and SEO differ, see AEO vs SEO: which matters more.