Answer engine optimisation
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the citation half of the managed programme. The service we sell is SEO and AEO together: Google rankings plus being the business an assistant names. This page explains the citation half. It is for mid-market service businesses in the UK, the US, Australia and Germany, and for large enterprises in Kenya, Nigeria, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
What the work covers
The questions buyers ask
We start from the wording a buyer uses, not from a keyword list built for an old ranking report. Typical questions are “who should I hire for this in this city”, “which firm is credible for this kind of work”, and “how does this company compare with the one already being recommended”.
Whether the site can be read
If the useful sentences only exist after JavaScript runs, many crawlers never see them. We check the raw HTML, the titles, the canonical URL, the internal links and the structured data. Schema is added for facts we can stand behind. A placeholder phone number or a made-up street address is removed, not published.
Pages that answer one question
Assistants cite pages that answer the question in the first screen, name the business clearly, and do not wander off into slogans. We draft those pages in the English the market uses. A person edits them.
A record of mentions
Each month we keep the prompts, the assistants, the date, and whether you were named. That record is the report. It is not a score we invented.
What we will not do
- Guarantee a citation, a ranking, or a traffic number.
- Promise links from Forbes, TechCrunch, or any other named publication.
- Publish unreviewed pages onto your site at a fixed daily quota.
- Stuff pages with synonyms in the hope a model treats that as expertise.
The Google half is on the SEO page. The combined programme, and the fees, are on SEO and AEO and pricing.
Who it is for
The fit is a mid-market service business in the UK, the US, Australia or Germany, usually about 10 to 200 people, or a large enterprise in Kenya, Nigeria, Botswana or Zimbabwe. Typical work is professional services, industrial and commercial supply, education and training, and similar firms where a buyer compares a few names before they call. One person on your side needs to confirm facts and approve copy. The company itself is in Johannesburg.
If you are an agency wanting to resell this, read the white-label page. That offer is secondary. The programme we lead with is SEO and AEO together.
Questions
Is this the same as SEO?
No. SEO is the work of being found in search results. Answer engine optimisation is the work of being cited when an assistant writes the answer. The technical base overlaps: a crawler still has to read the page. The writing and the measurement do not.
Which assistants do you cover?
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Copilot. We say which one we checked. We do not claim a result on an assistant we did not look at.
Will you publish on our site without us?
No. Drafts are edited by a person here, and you approve anything that is published on your domain.