Somebody looking for a supplier used to type a phrase into Google and work down the results. Plenty still do. But a growing number now ask an assistant instead, read the answer it gives them, and only click if something in it catches their attention. If your business is not part of that answer, you were never in the running, and no amount of position-three ranking changes that.
The work of being included has picked up the name answer engine optimization, or AEO. Some people call it GEO, for generative engine optimization. The label matters less than what actually shifts the outcome.
Why it is not simply SEO with a new name
Ranking well still helps, because the models draw on the same open web that search indexes. It is not sufficient though, and the reason is structural. A search engine hands over ten links and lets the reader choose. An assistant composes one answer and cites a handful of sources. There is no page two to be on. You are either in the answer or you are absent from the conversation entirely.
That changes which pages win. A page built to rank can get away with a long preamble before it answers anything, because a human will scroll. A model that is assembling a response wants the answer stated cleanly, attributed, and easy to lift.
What actually seems to move it
1. Answer the question in the first fifty words
Take the question your page exists for and answer it plainly near the top. Then expand. This is not a trick for machines; it is how a useful page reads for people who are in a hurry, which is most of them. The difference now is that failing to do it costs you a citation as well as a reader.
2. Publish things only you can publish
Assistants have no shortage of general explanation. They are short on specifics. Your pricing ranges, your actual process, what you learned on a project that went sideways, the answer to the question your clients keep asking on the first call. That material is not on ten thousand other sites, so when it is relevant it gets used. Rewriting what everyone already published is invisible to a model that has read all of it.
3. Be mentioned somewhere other than your own site
What a model believes about your business comes substantially from what other sources say. Directory listings with consistent details, a Google Business Profile that is actually filled in, industry sites, local press, a review profile with real reviews on it. These build the picture. A business with a good website and no presence anywhere else looks thin from the outside, whatever the website says about itself.
4. Put structure on your pages
Clear headings that match real questions. FAQ blocks with the question as the heading. Schema markup identifying your organisation, your services and your location. None of this is glamorous and all of it makes a page easier to parse and quote.
5. Keep it current, and say when it was updated
A page dated three years ago is a weak citation for a question about this year. Put a visible last-updated date on anything where currency matters, and then earn it by actually revisiting the content.
What does not work
Stuffing the page with the phrase you want to be found for reads as badly to a model as it does to a person, and has done for a long time. Neither does publishing forty thin pages to cover forty variations of a query; that pattern is well understood and gets treated as what it is. And nobody can sell you a guaranteed placement inside an AI answer. There is no submission form and there is no ad slot for it.
How to tell whether it is working
Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, in the phrasing they would use, and see what comes back. Do it monthly and keep the answers. It is crude, and right now it is also the most honest measurement available. Watch your referral traffic from assistant domains too, and treat any branded search increase you cannot otherwise explain as a signal worth investigating.
Where to start
Pick the five questions you get asked most often in a first conversation. Write one genuinely good page for each, answering it properly and in your own words. That is a better first move than any amount of technical adjustment, and it happens to be good for search engines, assistants and the reader who lands on it.
If you would rather have this handled, it overlaps with our SEO service and our AI search work, where the same principle applies to search inside your own site.
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