What We Do
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overview a question about your industry, the answer comes from somewhere. If it does not come from your website, it comes from a competitor's. That is the new reality of search. A growing share of queries never produce a list of blue links. Instead, AI tools synthesize a direct answer and cite the sources they trust. For many product and service categories, these AI-generated answers are now the first thing a potential customer reads. If your brand is not the cited source, you do not exist in that conversation.
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content so AI systems recognize it as authoritative and select it when generating responses. This is different from traditional SEO. SEO gets you ranked in a list of links. AEO gets you quoted, cited, or summarized inside the answer itself. The signals that drive AI citation overlap with SEO but are not identical. Entity clarity, factual consistency, structured data depth, and source authority all carry weight that traditional ranking factors do not fully capture. Businesses that establish citation authority now will hold an advantage that compounds as AI search grows.
How We Work
We start with a citation audit across every AI platform your audience uses. We query your core topics in Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot, recording where your brand appears, where competitors appear, and where neither does. That baseline tells us exactly where the opportunity sits. The audit evaluates four dimensions: structured data coverage, entity clarity, content answer-readiness, and source authority signals. Structured data is the most direct lever. We implement FAQ, HowTo, Organization, Service, and Article schema markup on your key pages so AI models can parse your content with precision rather than guessing at its structure. Entity optimization connects your brand name to the topics you should own, both on your site and across third-party directories, knowledge bases, and industry publications. Content restructuring is where most of the citation gains happen. We reformat existing pages to lead with direct, factual answers.
Questions become headers. Answers become concise opening paragraphs. Supporting evidence follows in a structured hierarchy that AI models prefer to cite. This is not a redesign. It is a reorganization of information architecture that serves both human readers and machine readers. Authority building targets the external signals AI systems use to determine trustworthiness: mentions in industry publications, citations in academic or professional content, and backlinks from authoritative domains. Monthly monitoring tracks citation frequency by platform, your position within AI-generated answers, and referral traffic from AI search tools. The report shows what improved, what gaps remain, and what we are testing next.