When a customer asks an AI assistant for help choosing a service, your business needs to be described clearly enough to be understood. Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, focuses on that visibility. It is not a switch that makes an assistant recommend you.
The useful work starts with accurate information, accessible pages and answers grounded in your expertise. It also requires restraint: being mentioned in one answer is not proof that you will appear for everyone asking a similar question.
Keep the SEO foundations
For Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google says the existing SEO fundamentals still apply. It does not require special AI markup or a separate set of optimisations. Pages need to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet to qualify as supporting links. Eligibility does not guarantee inclusion. See Google’s guidance on AI features.
That guidance describes Google’s systems. It should not be treated as a universal specification for every AI assistant. Keep platform-specific claims separate from general content improvements.
Make your business understandable
Review your main pages as if the reader has never heard of you. State what you do, who you help, where you operate and how someone can work with you. Make sure those facts agree with your contact details and other public profiles.
Answer a question directly before adding context. If someone asks what affects a website project’s cost, explain the factors: scope, content, integrations, editing needs and ongoing support. Do not hide the answer behind a request to book a call.
Where structured data is appropriate, it should reflect what is genuinely on the page. Markup cannot turn an unsupported claim into evidence or guarantee a citation.
Publish knowledge you can stand behind
Useful content might explain a decision your team helps clients make, a common implementation problem or a process customers find confusing. Name the author, keep details current and support externally verifiable claims with sources.
AI can help organise a draft or identify unanswered questions. A knowledgeable person still needs to check the facts, examples and recommendations. Publishing more pages is not a substitute for having something useful to say.
Measure observations carefully
Keep a small, repeatable set of customer questions. When checking answers, record the platform, date, wording and any cited pages. Treat this as a sample of what you observed, not a complete visibility score.
Review identifiable referral visits and the enquiries they produce where your analytics allow it. Some journeys will not be attributable. Google’s guidance also notes that traffic from its AI features is included in overall Web search reporting in Search Console, so those totals should not be presented as a standalone AEO result.
Our AEO service focuses on improving clarity, content and discoverability, with reporting that distinguishes observations from assumptions. If your service pages are still unclear, start with the SEO basics.