What Is AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)?

AEO is the practice of optimising your website and business listings so that answer engines, meaning ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, and similar tools, can pull accurate, citable information about your business into the answers they generate. Traditional SEO asks “how do I rank on page one?” AEO asks a different question: “how do I become the source an AI system trusts enough to reference?”

Those two goals overlap but they’re not identical. A page can rank reasonably well in classic search results and still be invisible to an AI answer engine if it isn’t structured clearly, marked up with schema, or written to directly answer the question a searcher actually asked. Our own guide to structuring content for AI answer engines goes deeper into the mechanics, but the short version is this: AI systems reward clarity, structure, and demonstrated topical authority far more heavily than they reward keyword density.

Bottom line: a business that shows up in a Google AI Overview or a ChatGPT recommendation gets that referral with zero competing blue links on the page. It’s the closest thing to a default answer that modern search offers.

What’s Included in Click Shark’s AEO Service

Our AEO service is one productised package. There are no tiers to compare and no upsell ladder to climb, just a fixed monthly scope of work delivered consistently. Here’s exactly what’s included every month:

• One new location or service page, schema-marked and built in FAQ format, written to directly answer the real questions your customers are typing into Google and AI tools
• One blog post per month, written specifically to be extracted and cited by AI systems, not just to rank in a traditional results page
• Ongoing technical maintenance, so that both Google and AI crawlers can reliably read, parse, and trust your site’s information
• Ongoing site-wide optimisation of metadata, schema markup, and heading structure across your existing pages, not just the new ones
• Google Business Profile management, alongside building 120 citations across relevant directories to strengthen your presence everywhere a customer or an AI tool might look
• A printed QR code review card your team can hand a customer on the spot for a ten-second Google review
• A full cross-platform consistency check on your business name, address, phone number, and categories, because conflicting listings actively undermine AI trust signals
• A monthly report showing exactly what was published, built, and improved that month, so you’re never guessing what you’re paying for
• A quarterly check-in call to review progress and catch issues before they compound

A myth worth addressing directly: the common advice is that you need dozens of scattered tactics running simultaneously to see movement in AI visibility. We disagree. A tightly scoped, consistent set of deliverables executed properly every single month outperforms a scattergun approach nine times out of ten, mostly because consistency is what actually builds the trust signals AI systems are looking for.

“The businesses that win AI visibility aren’t the ones doing the most. They’re the ones doing the same right things, every month, without gaps.” — Head of AEO Strategy

Compare that with our technical SEO guide if you want to see the foundational technical work this service builds on.

The Search Intelligence Report: Where Every Engagement Starts

Before committing to a 12-month retainer, most clients start with our Search Intelligence Report, a one-off, paid diagnostic priced at £297. It’s a genuine audit of where your business currently stands across both traditional search and AI answer engines, covering technical health, content gaps, citation consistency, and Google Business Profile completeness.

The SIR exists because we don’t think you should commit to a year-long engagement based on a sales pitch alone. You should see, in specific and concrete terms, what’s actually broken or missing before deciding whether the retainer is worth it. If you go on to sign the 12-month retainer, the £297 comes straight off your first invoice. If you don’t, you’ve still got a genuinely useful diagnostic document that outlines exactly where your visibility gaps sit.

Our guide on how AI search engines choose which websites to cite covers many of the same signals we assess during a SIR, if you want a sense of what’s being evaluated.

What Makes Our AEO Approach Different

Here’s something we won’t do, and it’s worth being upfront about it: we will never tell you that we guarantee a mention in ChatGPT, a citation in Google’s AI Overviews, or a specific ranking on any AI platform. Nobody who works honestly in this space can make that promise, because none of us control how these models choose to summarise or cite a source on any given day.

What we can do, and what every deliverable in our AEO package is built around, is making your business genuinely citable and trustworthy to AI systems and to Google. That means structured data that’s actually correct, content that answers real questions instead of padding for keyword count, consistent business information across every platform an AI system might cross-reference, and a Google Business Profile that’s complete rather than half-finished. That’s the honest version of AI visibility work, and it’s the only version that holds up over a 12-month engagement.

A Sheffield-based trades client came to us with a GBP profile missing half its categories and location pages that hadn’t been touched in three years. Within the first two months of a comparable engagement, simply fixing the structural gaps and publishing consistently produced measurable movement in local visibility, before any content had even had time to fully mature in the search index. That’s the order of operations we believe in: fix the foundation, then build on it consistently.

If you want to see how we frame this kind of work more broadly, our guide to building topical authority for generative search and our piece on how long it takes to see results from GEO are both useful starting points. We also cover the same fundamentals across local SEO planning and local SEO auditing, since AEO and strong local SEO share the same structural backbone.

We work across a wide range of industries, from local trades businesses to growing service brands, and you can see the kind of work we’ve done on our case studies page or read more about the team behind it on our about us page.