Answer Engine Optimization that gets your brand cited in AI answers.

AEO services get your brand into the answers AI systems give when a buyer asks about your category, your product, or the problem you solve. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) covers three things. Monitoring where you appear across answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Earning citations in the third-party sources those systems already trust. And structuring your own pages so answers can be extracted cleanly.

For B2B the stakes sit in the consideration set rather than the click. A buyer working through a long, multi-stakeholder purchase asks a lot of questions before they ever contact a vendor, so being absent from those answers costs you the shortlist. That holds whether you sell B2B SaaS, insurance, manufacturing, or professional services, because the buying committee behaves the same way.

Four things. Whether they measure your current visibility before proposing any work, because a strategy written without a baseline is guesswork. Whether the plan includes off-site work, since most of what AI systems cite doesn’t live on your website. Whether they can implement the technical side themselves instead of handing you a list. And whether the reporting shows share of AI answers and citation sources rather than a screenshot of one good result.

The second one separates most AEO agency pitches. An on-page checklist is easy to sell and easy to deliver, and it’s the smaller half of the lever. If nobody is talking about digital PR, comparison and review coverage, or which third-party sources feed the answers in your category, the AEO strategy is incomplete.

Mostly because we treat AI visibility as part of search rather than a separate product. Traditional SEO and AEO pull from many of the same signals, so we run them under one roadmap instead of selling AI search optimization as a bolt-on that duplicates the audit you already paid for.

The other reason is that implementation doesn’t leave the building. Structured data, semantic HTML, llms.txt, access for AI crawlers, and new question-led pages are all website changes, and we build websites. Nothing sits in a queue at another vendor. Streetlight Data grew AI search sessions 637% with that setup, alongside the organic program.

Practically nothing. AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization, GEO for Generative Engine Optimization. They describe the same work, and the agencies drawing a hard line between them are usually just differentiating a pitch.

GEO is the newer term and leans toward generative systems like ChatGPT. AEO is broader and covers Google AI Overviews and snippet-style answers too. We use AEO because it’s the term more buyers search for, and the distinction doesn’t change what needs doing.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. Those four are where B2B buyers are right now, and we monitor all of them so you can see brand visibility platform by platform instead of as one blended number.

The list will change and we expect it to. The underlying work, being accurately described in the sources these AI engines trust, holds up regardless of which platform your buyers use next. That’s also why we don’t build a strategy around one platform’s quirks.

Share of AI answers is the headline metric. Across a defined set of prompts your buyers would realistically ask, how often does your brand appear. We track that alongside citation frequency, which sources are being cited, competitor visibility on the same prompts, and referral traffic arriving from AI search platforms.

We report monthly and tie it to pipeline where the data allows. Attribution in AI driven search is harder than in traditional search engines, since a buyer can read an answer about you and arrive weeks later through a branded search with no referrer. We’d rather tell you that up front than sell you a dashboard that pretends otherwise.