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GEO
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Structure content so answer engines recognize and surface it.
Overview
What we do & why it matters
AEO gets your content recognized as the answer — in featured snippets, People Also Ask, and AI assistants. We structure clear definitions, Q&A and schema so engines can extract and present your material.
What’s included
- Question & intent mapping
- Answer-first content structuring
- FAQ & schema markup
- Featured-snippet optimization
- Entity clarity & disambiguation
- Monitoring & iteration
Part of our GEO engagement · from transparent pricing.
How it works
What makes a page quotable.
An answer engine does not rank your page — it borrows a fragment of it. So the unit of optimisation stops being the document and becomes the passage: a claim that still makes sense when lifted out of its paragraph.
Self-contained statements
"Implementation takes four to six weeks and includes data migration" can be quoted. "We work fast and thoroughly" cannot.
Question-shaped headings
Headings that match how people ask give the model an anchor. Clever headings that hide the topic do the opposite.
Facts in structure, not prose
Numbers buried in sentences get skipped because the model cannot verify them. The same numbers in a table, list or dataset get used.
Freshness that is visible
Review dates and updated figures signal that the source is maintained, which matters more in answers than in classic rankings.
A useful test: take any paragraph on your key page, remove the surrounding text, and ask whether it still answers something. If it does not, neither will an assistant.
The work
What an AEO engagement actually contains.
Research
Finding the questions worth answering
Keyword tools report what people typed into a search box. Assistants get asked something different — longer, messier, more conversational, and often comparative. Optimising for the first set while buyers use the second is the most common reason an AEO programme produces nothing.
Sales call language
The questions prospects actually ask, taken from call recordings and sales notes. The highest-value source available and the least used.
Support and onboarding tickets
Where the real objections and confusions live, phrased by customers rather than by your marketing team.
Comparison prompts
‘X versus Y’, ‘alternatives to Z’, ‘best tool for’. Commercially the most valuable category and the one most companies refuse to address directly.
Assistant follow-ups
What the assistant itself suggests asking next, which reveals how the system models the decision process.
Community phrasing
How the problem is described where your buyers talk to each other, which is rarely how your category describes itself.
Prompts where competitors win
The gap list. Which questions return a competitor, what gets cited, and whether that source is beatable on substance.
The output is a prioritised question set with the evidence each answer will need — which is also a content brief your writers can work from without further interpretation.
Anatomy
What an answer-ready page looks like
The page still has to work for a human reader; nothing here is about writing for machines. But the ordering and the structure differ from a conventional landing page, because the first job is to be extractable.
The answer in the first lines
Stated plainly before any context, in the question's own words. If a reader has to scroll to find out, so does the retrieval layer.
Evidence attached to claims
Each assertion with the number, source or condition that supports it, close enough that extracting one carries the other.
Sections that survive extraction
Each heading answers something on its own, without depending on what came before to make sense.
An honest comparison section
Where you fit and where you do not. Pages that only flatter themselves are discounted; pages that qualify get quoted.
Real structure, not visual structure
Headings, lists and tables as actual elements. A table built from styled divs is invisible to whatever decides what to quote.
Author and update signals
Who wrote it, what changed and when — accurate, because an unchanged page with a refreshed date is a signal that gets discounted.
Measurement
Proving an AEO programme is doing something
There is no console for this, so measurement is built rather than connected. What we track, in order of how much weight we put on it:
We report the failures too. A question set where nothing moved in a quarter is a finding about the content or the market, not something to quietly drop from the next deck.
Comparison content
The questions your competitors are already answering for you
Comparison and alternative questions are where purchase decisions actually get made, and they are the category most companies refuse to address. The result is predictable: the assistant answers anyway, using a competitor's comparison page or a review site's summary, and your side of the argument is told by someone with an interest in losing it.
Versus pages, written honestly
Where you win, where you lose, who should pick the other one. Pages that only flatter themselves are discounted by both readers and models.
Alternatives pages
Including options you lose to. Being the source that maps the whole landscape is how you get cited on the question, not just on your own name.
Category definitions
If your category is new or contested, defining it clearly is how you become the reference the assistant reaches for when explaining it.
Migration and switching
What moving away from an incumbent actually involves. High-intent, rarely answered properly, and almost never answered by the incumbent.
Pricing explained
What drives the number and what a realistic range looks like. ‘Contact us’ is unquotable, so you are absent from every pricing question.
Who it is not for
The most counter-intuitive and most effective section. Disqualifying statements get quoted because they are specific, and they pre-filter your pipeline.
This is usually the hardest part to get signed off internally and the part that moves the most. We will make the argument, with the gap list showing which competitor currently owns each question.
Honest limits
Where AEO stops working
Being quotable helps when there is something worth quoting and a system willing to look. Neither condition is universal.
Nothing distinctive to say
If the page repeats what twenty others already say better, structure will not rescue it. Assistants have no shortage of generic sources.
No underlying authority
On index-backed surfaces, a page nobody links to and nothing ranks for rarely enters the candidate pool, however well it is written.
Questions with no commercial end
Being cited on a definition that never leads to a purchase is a vanity metric. We prioritise questions with a buyer behind them.
Volatility between runs
The same prompt returns different sources on consecutive runs. Decisions should rest on trends across repeated measurement, not on one screenshot.
Claims you cannot evidence
We will not write a number into a page to make it more quotable. If it cannot be substantiated, it does not go in, whatever it would do for citations.
Platform redesigns
These systems change frequently and sometimes abruptly. What survives is accurate, structured, genuinely useful content — so that is what we build.
Questions
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), answered.
AEO vs GEO — what’s the difference?
AEO gets you recognized as an answer; GEO gets your brand written into the generated answer with a citation. We do both.
Does AEO need new content?
Often we restructure existing content first — clear answers and schema — before producing net-new pieces.
How long before we see citations appear?
On retrieval-based surfaces, where the assistant fetches live, changes can register within weeks of publishing — sometimes faster for questions nobody else answers well. On surfaces built over a search index, you are waiting for crawling, indexing and ranking first, so the realistic horizon is a quarter or more. Answers drawn from model memory rather than retrieval move on training cycles that nobody outside the labs can schedule. We say which bucket each target question falls into before the work starts.
Do we need to write new content, or can existing pages be adapted?
Usually a mix, weighted toward adaptation at the start because it is faster and cheaper. A great deal of existing content contains the right answer buried in the middle of a page that never states it cleanly; restructuring that is often enough. New pages get commissioned where a high-value question has no existing home, particularly comparison questions, which most companies have never addressed directly.
Will this cannibalise our search traffic?
The fear is reasonable and the evidence is mixed by category. Assistants do answer some questions without sending a click, and informational top-of-funnel traffic is the most exposed. What they also do is shorten research for buyers who then arrive with intent. Our position is that the traffic shift is happening whether or not you participate, and being the source that gets cited is better than being the source that gets paraphrased. We track both sides so you can see the trade in your own numbers.
Does schema markup help with AEO?
It helps, and it is not sufficient on its own. Markup clarifies what a page is about and how its parts relate, which makes extraction more reliable; it does not make an unremarkable answer worth quoting. We treat it as hygiene — correct, validated, matching the visible content — and spend the real effort on whether the answer itself deserves to win.
Can we do this for a product nobody has heard of?
Yes, and it is one of the few channels where that is realistic. Assistants select sources by whether the content answers the question, not purely by brand familiarity, so a small company with a genuinely better answer can be cited alongside incumbents. What does not work is having nothing substantive to say — obscurity is surmountable, emptiness is not.
How does AEO fit with the paid programme?
Paid tells you within weeks which questions and phrasings actually move buyers, which is exactly the research AEO needs and would otherwise take quarters to gather. Running them together means ad spend doubles as question research, and the pages built for citation also become better landing pages. We report both in one view for that reason.
Is it risky to publish honest comparisons with competitors?
The commercial fear is that you send buyers elsewhere. In practice the traffic on those questions exists whether or not you participate, and right now it resolves to a source that has no reason to represent you fairly. A comparison that concedes real weaknesses is more credible, gets cited more, and pre-qualifies the people who do contact you. The genuine constraints are legal — trademark use and substantiating claims about another company — and we stay on the right side of both by sticking to verifiable, dated facts and saying where our view is a view.
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