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Answer Engine Optimisation

AEO Services: Be the Answer, Every Time

Answer engines reward the clearest, best-supported answer to a question. AEO makes your pages that answer, in Google's AI Overviews, featured snippets, "People also ask" and the AI assistants your buyers use.

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The short answer

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring content, data and pages so that search features and AI assistants can lift them as the direct answer to a question. It focuses on question-shaped headings, a clear answer in the first sentences, supporting evidence and structured data.

Why AEO matters

When an answer appears on the results page, fewer people scroll. Pew found clicks on traditional results fell from 15% to 8% of visits when a Google AI summary appeared (Pew Research Center, July 2025). Being the source of that answer is how you stay visible, and it is how your brand name reaches people who never click at all.

The questions are also getting longer. Google says early AI Mode users ask questions two to three times the length of traditional searches (Google, AI Mode in the UK). Long, specific questions are where a precise, well-structured answer beats a generic page.

Illustration of an AI assistant answer that cites a brand, with connected nodes for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews

What we do

Question researchWe collect the real questions from sales calls, support tickets, "People also ask" and AI prompts, then map one clear page or section to each.
Answer-first rewritesThe answer in the first two sentences, the evidence after, headings phrased as the question. See our guide to answer-first content.
Structured dataFAQ, HowTo, Product, Organisation and other schema where it genuinely fits the visible content (Google: structured data intro).
Technical performanceFast, server-rendered pages that crawlers can read without running JavaScript, and Core Web Vitals in the green (web.dev: Web Vitals).
E-E-A-T signalsNamed authors, credentials, dates and references, which Google's helpful content guidance asks for (Google Search Central: creating helpful content).
Multi-platform checksWe test answers in Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot, not just one engine.

What good AEO looks like on a page

  • The question as the heading
  • A direct answer in one or two sentences, with a number or fact where possible
  • Detail, nuance and exceptions after the answer
  • A table where comparisons are involved
  • Sources named and linked
  • A clear next step for the reader
From our client work

We rebuilt our own site this way: every service, industry and glossary page opens with a direct answer and cites its evidence. See the glossary for examples.

FAQ

What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO aims to rank pages. AEO aims to have your content used as the answer itself. Most AEO work also improves normal rankings.
Does FAQ schema still help?
It helps search engines and AI systems understand question-and-answer content, even though Google shows FAQ rich results far less often than it used to. Only mark up FAQs that appear on the page.
How quickly does AEO work?
Rewritten pages can start appearing in snippets and AI answers within weeks of being recrawled, especially for specific, long-tail questions.

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