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Ask ChatGPT for the best accountant for a small business, and you do not get ten blue links. You get two or three names and a sentence on each. Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of making sure your business is one of those names.
What AEO means
AEO is to AI answers what SEO is to search results. Instead of ranking a page, you are trying to get your business mentioned, recommended and cited inside the answers from ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, Claude and Perplexity.
How AI picks a business
Answer engines do not have opinions. They summarise what they can read: your website, your reviews and listings, and what other sites say about you. Many of them search the web before answering, so the sources they find for that question shape who gets named. When those sources are clear, consistent and positive about you, you are a safer name to give.
Where the question is asked from matters too, more than most people expect. In our own scans, “best mixed pickle brand” asked with no location was answered from American sites like Amazon and Chowhound; asked from Multan, Pakistan, it cited Pakistani retailers and brands instead. If your customers are local, the questions you track should be too.
The five signals that matter
- 1Reviews and reputationHow many reviews you have, how recent they are, and what they say. Answers often repeat the specifics people mention, like a service, a price point or how quickly you responded.
- 2Accurate listingsThe same name, address, hours and services everywhere you are listed: Google, the directories your industry uses, marketplaces. Conflicting details make you a riskier name to give.
- 3Clear answers on your own sitePages that answer the questions buyers actually ask, in plain language: what you offer, what it costs, where you work, who it is for. An engine can only repeat what it can find.
- 4Mentions elsewhereComparison articles, local press, community threads and round-ups that name you. Engines lean on these when they explain why one option is a good pick.
- 5Crawlers can read youIf your robots.txt or firewall blocks AI crawlers, the engines that rely on them cannot read your pages at all. Check before you write anything new.
A 30-day plan
Four weeks, one job each. None of it needs a developer.
How to measure it
Track the same questions on every engine your buyers use, from their location, on a schedule. Three numbers tell you most of the story: how often you are mentioned, how often your own site is cited as a source, and how many of your questions you show up for at all.
One caution: answers vary from one day to the next, and the sources engines cite change heavily from month to month. Judge a change over several days rather than one answer, and when you ship a fix, compare the questions it targeted with the ones it did not. That is how our Action Center checks a fix two weeks later, and why it reports exact counts rather than claiming a fix caused a change.