Traditional SEO competes for a spot on a results page. Answer engine optimization competes to be the business the model names when it writes the answer. You want both — and increasingly, the second one is where the decision gets made.
A model can only recommend what it can find, parse, and trust. Most local businesses fail at all three — not because they're bad businesses, but because nobody built the site to be read by anything other than a person.
This is not a replacement for SEO. Models are trained and grounded on the open web, so the pages that rank well are frequently the pages that get retrieved and quoted. Good SEO is the foundation. AEO is the layer on top that decides whether you get named or merely indexed.
The extraction gap
A model doesn't see your layout, your photography, or your design. It sees whatever it can pull out as plain, structured fact — and it quietly ignores everything else.
Here's the same page in both views. Toggle it and watch how much simply disappears.
Want this run on your actual site?
Get your audit →Custom hardwood kitchen cabinets, built to order in our Daviess County shop since 2009. Solid maple, cherry and quartersawn oak. We handle design, build and installation ourselves — no subcontractors.
Four of the most persuasive facts on that page — the hours, the price, the rating and the proof it's a real business — are invisible. Ask a model “who does custom cabinets near me and what do they charge?” and it names the competitor whose numbers it could actually read.
Illustrative example. Business name is fictional.
What we do
The work splits along those three lines. Skip any one of them and the other two stop paying off.
Your business defined once, precisely, and described the same way everywhere a model can reach — site, profile, citations and directories. Then marked up with structured data so there's no guessing about what it's reading. This is the single highest-leverage piece of AEO work.
Direct answers to the questions people actually ask, placed where a model can lift them without stitching three paragraphs together. Concrete facts — prices, timelines, materials, service areas — in plain crawlable text rather than buried in a hero image or a PDF.
None of it matters if the crawlers can't get in. We check that AI crawlers aren't accidentally blocked, that content renders without JavaScript gymnastics, and we publish an llms.txt that points models at the pages you actually want cited.
Models lean on third-party sources they already trust — local news, trade directories, association listings, review platforms. Being described accurately and consistently across those is what turns a claim on your own website into something a model is willing to repeat.
Keyword and intent research, title and heading structure, internal linking, page speed, and local landing pages that actually deserve to rank. Answer engines are grounded on the same open web Google indexes, so this work compounds into both.
We run a fixed set of real buying-intent prompts against ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews every month and record whether you were named. It's the only honest way to know whether the work is landing, rather than assuming.
How we measure it
There's no rank tracker for answer engines, so we build the benchmark by hand: a fixed list of the questions your customers really ask, run against each engine on a schedule, scored on whether your business appears in the answer.
Share of tracked prompts where the business was named. Figures shown are an illustrative reporting example, not a guarantee — every market and engine behaves differently.
A word on honesty. Answer engines are the least predictable channel in marketing right now. Each model refreshes its sources on its own schedule, and two people can ask the same question and get different answers. Anyone promising you a guaranteed position inside ChatGPT is selling something they can't deliver. What we can do is control the inputs, measure the outputs every month, and show you the trend line.
How it goes
We build your prompt set and run it across all four engines to establish where you stand today — and, just as usefully, which competitors are getting named instead.
Entity definition, schema, crawler access and llms.txt. The technical foundation that makes everything downstream legible to a model.
Content built to answer the questions in your prompt set directly, with the concrete facts models need in plain text where they can be lifted.
Monthly re-scoring against the same prompt set, so you see the trend rather than a snapshot. Gaps that persist get attacked from the source-authority side.
Every engagement covers
Entity & knowledge graph alignmentOne consistent definition of your business, everywhere.
Structured data implementationOrganization, Service, FAQ, Product and review markup.
Keyword & question researchWhat people type into Google and what they ask a model.
Technical SEO auditSpeed, indexation, canonicals, sitemaps and render paths.
AI crawler access & llms.txtMaking sure the engines can reach what you want cited.
Local landing pagesReal pages for the towns you serve, not doorway spam.
Citation & directory consistencyThe third-party sources models cross-reference you against.
Monthly reportingRankings, traffic and engine-by-engine citation scoring.
Questions
Marked up with FAQ schema — the same technique we build into every client site so answer engines can lift it cleanly.
It's the work of making your business easy for a large language model to find, understand and quote. Traditional SEO competes for a position on a results page; AEO competes to be the business a model names when it composes an answer. In practice that means entity clarity, structured data, factual content in crawlable text, and presence on the third-party sources models rely on.
No, and be careful with anyone who says it is. Models are trained and grounded on the open web, so pages that rank well are frequently the pages that get retrieved and cited. The two reinforce each other. We treat AEO as an additional layer on a solid SEO foundation, not a replacement for it.
No, and neither can anyone else. Each model refreshes its sources on its own schedule, answers vary between users, and none of them publish a ranking algorithm. What we control is the input side: how findable, parseable and well-sourced your business is. Then we measure the output every month so you can see whether it's working instead of taking it on faith.
Technical and schema fixes can register within weeks. Content and organic ranking improvements usually show over two to four months. Model citations are the slowest and least predictable of the three, because each engine decides on its own when to refresh what it knows about you. The trend line matters more than any single month.
The opposite, in most cases. Local queries are exactly where models give short, specific answers naming two or three businesses, and local competition for that space is still thin. A well-structured small business in a rural market can often get named ahead of larger competitors who have never done the work.
Not always. If your current site is reasonably fast and the content can be edited properly, we can add the structure and schema to what you have. If it's slow, locked in a page builder, or the content lives inside images, rebuilding the foundation first is usually cheaper than fighting it. The audit tells us which situation you're in.
We'll run your business through Google, the map pack and four different answer engines, then send you the results with the gaps marked. No pitch deck, no obligation.
Request your free audit →Usually back within two business days.