For marketing teams, questions like ‘are we doing anything about AI search?’ or ‘why aren’t we showing up in ChatGPT?’ are likely being fielded pretty regularly now. It’s become the new normal; it’s an area senior leadership are keen to explore and expect to see progress in.
If being asked about it makes you feel behind as a marketer, try not to be too hard on yourself; the landscape has changed significantly and very quickly. We are talking about Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) far more today than we were a year or even six months ago.
Here, we’ll provide a clear definition that will help you answer these questions, as well as the commercial reasoning behind a focus on AI, and help with framing it in presentations to senior leaders and board members. In essence, we’ll demonstrate that AEO is not a new discipline that’s replacing SEO, it’s just what good SEO now needs to include.
What is AEO? (The Short Answer)
Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, seeks to make your business the source that search engines and AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot choose when they answer a user’s question. SEO aims to get your pages ranking highly in search results, whereas AEO aims to get your business cited in AI answers as a recommended and trusted source of truth.
There are plenty of terms flying around at the moment, and one of the most relevant is ‘answer engine’. In short, an answer engine is an AI tool that understands a user’s question and responds conversationally instead of giving a list of website links as we are used to with Google. You may also see LLMO (Large Language Model Optimisation), which is largely the same practice. Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, has the same aim, but focuses more on structure and factual clarity.
We often use ‘AI search optimisation’, but getting drawn into terminology debates is something of a time waster. What matters is the outcome: understanding what AI search tools value, and optimising your website, and wider digital footprint, accordingly.
Why is This Suddenly a Boardroom Topic?
There is obviously a huge difference in what a user does with the output of a search engine and what they do with the answer an AI tool gives them; often, when interacting with an AI tool, they don’t click through to a website. Boards and bosses are seeing this behaviour take hold in the press and even their families, as well as hearing it from competitors. Basically, if an AI tool recommends three competitors and not you, you’re not even in the customer’s set of businesses for consideration.
To bring this into focus, data released by Similarweb back in July 2026 found that AI Overviews show up for about 43% of all queries, with Semrush suggesting that website traffic from AI search may surpass traffic from traditional search by 2028.
AEO vs SEO: What’s Actually Different?
This is something we now find ourselves explaining on a regular basis too. It’s true that the foundations are the same: the technical health of your website needs to be good, the content needs to be high quality, and there should be authority and trust signals on and pointing to your site.
What changes is where that hard work gets surfaced (in answers now as well as search results), the format of the content (in that it should be well-structured, clear, and quotable), and how we measure the success (visibility and citations as well as clicks).
| SEO | AEO | |
| What it is | Making your website easier to find and rank in search results | Making your business the source AI tools and search engines choose when they answer a question |
| The goal | Rankings, traffic and enquiries from search | Being cited, recommended and trusted inside the answer itself |
| Where customers meet you | A list of links on Google or Bing | A single answer in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot |
| How customers search | Short keywords (‘Psychotherapist Brighton’) | Full questions and conversations (“Which psychotherapist in Brighton is best for marriage counselling?”) |
| Content approach | Pages optimised around keywords and search intent | Clear, direct answers, structured content and expertise that can be quoted accurately |
| Authority signals | Backlinks, content quality, technical health | The same, plus brand mentions, reviews, consistent business information and presence across trusted sources |
| How success is measured | Rankings, organic traffic, conversions | Visibility and citations in AI answers, brand mentions, referral traffic from AI tools, conversions |
| Timeframe | Months to build, compounding over time | Similar. It builds on SEO foundations and rewards consistency |
AEO isn’t a replacement for SEO; it’s another layer of it, which means that those with weak foundations in SEO will likely struggle with AEO too.
Why AEO matters commercially
We know you need a strong argument for the budget and attention you feel AI search optimisation needs, so allow us to provide you with the following points:
Visibility at the point of decision
An AI answer shapes a shortlist before a customer even heads to a website; being on that list of recommendations from AI can put your businesses’ name in the running.
Better lead quality
Users arriving on your site via a recommendation from an AI tool are more likely to be doing so pre-qualified, as they’ve had more of an opportunity to explain the nuance of their query.
Competitive risk
The early bird gets the worm is a proverb that endures; early movers are building authority that will surely be difficult to displace.
Efficiency
We’re finding that a lot of the work required to tick AEO boxes is actually improving the structure of pages, refreshing content, increasing trust signals, and making pages more useful, which is good news for conversion and traditional SEO rankings.
It’s true that right now, AI search traffic is still smaller than traditional search for most sites, and measurement is still very far from perfect. No one can guarantee citation, either.
How to Explain AEO to Your Board or Boss in 60 Seconds
When your boss is busy and needs a bitesized answer, or you only have a few minutes to make it count in front of the board, something of an AEO elevator pitch may be helpful:
What it is:
“AEO, or Answer Engine Optimisation, is ensuring that when customers ask AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude a question, our brand is one of the answers they’re given.”
Why it matters to us:
“More of our customers are doing their research using AI tools, often without even visiting a website, so if we’re not part of the answer, we don’t even make the shortlist. That’s enquiries, revenue, and potentially our share of the market lost.”
What we’re doing:
“We’re suggesting a benchmark review to see how we appear for our most valuable customer questions, so we can decide where to invest from facts rather than guesses.”
It can be easy to lead with acronyms and technology, but customer behaviour is ultimately what we would advise leading with, ending on the decision you’re asking for, which is investment into AEO.
The Questions Your Board Will Ask, and How To Answer Them
Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
AEO is simply a new layer of SEO. The foundations are the same in that your website needs to be healthy technically, with high quality content, and trust signals that are on your site, and that point to your site externally. What’s new is the way pages are structured, with clear, understandable answers to customer questions that AI can lift and cite.
Can we guarantee we’ll appear in ChatGPT or AI Overviews?
No, that can’t be guaranteed; anyone that says they can do that is overselling. What you can do is improve the chances of being cited through clear answers and strong content, as well as consistent business information and genuine authority.
How do we measure it?
We can start with a baseline, with ten of the most commercially important customer questions, recording whether and how the business appears in AI answers compared to competitors. This can be done monthly alongside tracking referral traffic from AI tools, branded search, and enquiries.
ten most commercially important customer questions and record whether, and how, your business appears in AI answers compared with competitors.
How much should we invest?
A sensible first step is a small time-limited baseline review; any further investment can be decided upon when there’s evidence to warrant it. A lot of the work improves traditional SEO as well as conversion, so it isn’t wasted spend.
What happens if we do nothing?
Nothing dramatic will happen overnight, but the risk could compound; competitors who build strong authority and clear answers become the trusted source that AI tools cite, and that’s going to be harder to displace further down the line. Search traffic won’t vanish immediately, but the business may be left off the shortlist of users using AI to search.
What good AEO looks like in practice
For our clients, our AEO strategy includes answering customer questions clearly on their site, publishing strong and structured content, working on authority signals where we can, and ensuring there’s technical accessibility for AI crawlers and for measuring visibility. This area of search is changing all the time, but these are the principles that we have noticed are enduring, and as they feed well into the foundations of traditional SEO, we’re confident that this is the way ahead for our clients.
H2: Where to Start
A lot of conversations with senior leadership or the board tend to stall because nobody knows where the business currently stands. Once you’ve done a baseline audit of ten customer questions, it’s clearer what needs to happen next. Run them through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity etc, and note whether your brand is mentioned, how it’s described, and which competitors appear alongside or instead of it. If you feel you’d like a hand from a team that lives and breathes AEO and SEO on a daily basis, we would love to help; get in touch with us for a chat.
