Answer engine optimisation is making your business easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI answers to find, understand and quote correctly. It means clear facts in plain language, direct answers to real questions, structured data, consistent descriptions across the web, and pages that AI crawlers can actually reach.
George McKenna, Chairman and CTO, ETT Group. Updated 15 October 2026.
Traditional SEO aims to rank a page. AEO aims to be the source an AI assistant uses when it answers. The two overlap, but AEO puts more weight on:
- Direct answers. A question as the heading and a clear two or three sentence answer straight underneath.
- Plain facts. Who you are, what you do, where, for whom, stated the same way everywhere.
- Structured data. Schema markup for your organisation, people, articles and FAQs.
- Reachability. AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, pages that render without heavy scripts, and an llms.txt that points to the important pages.
- Consistency. The same description on your site, LinkedIn, directories and press. Assistants trust facts they see repeated.
This site is built that way: a facts page, an llms.txt, structured data on every page, and this Answers section. My agency, Emerging Digital Partners, builds the same for clients, and ai-search.services audits how visible a business is today.
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