What is Answer Engine Optimisation?
Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is about making your business easy for AI tools and modern search to understand, trust and actually recommend when someone's looking for what you do.
It's the same underlying idea as SEO, but aimed at a world where someone needing a plumber now asks Google or ChatGPT one question and takes whatever answer comes back, rather than scrolling ten blue links and picking whichever site looks least dodgy.
Why this is a different job to ranking on a results page
Traditional SEO is mostly about earning a good position on a search results page: the better you rank, the more people click through to your site and read it themselves. None of that's stopped mattering.
AI answer tools skip a step. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar tools read a handful of sources, work out what's actually being asked, and hand the person a direct answer, sometimes without them ever visiting a website at all. If your site isn't one of the sources that gets read and understood correctly, you're not in that answer, no matter how good your ranking would otherwise be, or how many five-star reviews you've got sitting there unread by the machine.
Crawlability
If Google or an AI tool can't properly read the important bits of your site, it can't do much with them. Having the answer sitting on your site doesn't help if Google has to go looking for it with a head torch.
What AEO actually involves
There's no single trick. It's a handful of ordinary things done properly, the same way a good job is mostly about not skipping steps:
Structure — clean headings, correct schema, and a page that clearly states what the business is, what it does and where it operates. Not clever. Obvious.
Answers — real content that answers the questions customers actually ask, in plain language, near the top of the page. If you get asked "do you do weekend callouts" twenty times a month, that answer should be on the site, not locked in your head.
Consistency — your business name, address, phone number and other details saying the same thing everywhere they appear, not just on your own website. A mismatched phone number on an old directory listing is a small thing to you and a red flag to a machine.
Those three things map fairly directly onto the first three steps of the SORTED framework, if you want the longer version of how it's actually done.
What AEO isn't
It isn't keyword stuffing, and it isn't a magic prompt or setting that makes an AI tool recommend you. Nobody, including us, can guarantee that a specific AI tool will mention a specific business by name, and anyone who tells you they've cracked that formula is selling you something else. What AEO does is remove the reasons an AI tool would skip over you: unclear structure, missing details, or information that contradicts itself across the web.
It also isn't instant. Search engines and AI systems need time to re-crawl a site and build confidence in the changes before they show up in how those tools describe your business.
Where this fits with what you're already doing
If you've already put work into a decent website and some basic SEO, AEO isn't a separate project bolted on top. It's the next layer: making sure the structure and content underneath your site is something a machine can read as confidently as a person can, because right now most trade websites were built entirely for the person looking at it, and never touched again once they went live.
The quickest way to see where your own site stands is to run it through the Once-Over. It checks the specific, measurable things this article talks about and tells you straight what's working and what's worth sorting first, in about a minute.
See where your own site stands
The Once-Over checks the exact things this article's talking about, on your actual website, in about a minute. Tells you straight what's worth sorting first.