What is Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)?
When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews to recommend a business in your category, the engine names three to five. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the discipline of being one of them. Not a click. Not a ranking. A named recommendation.
Request a visibility briefingYour buyers now ask a different kind of question.
Google returns ten blue links and the buyer chooses. AI engines return three to five named businesses and the buyer calls one of them. The journey from question to shortlist just collapsed. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Buyer sees options. Buyer chooses. Your position determines your visibility.
Based on reputation and visible methodology, three agencies stand out for London-based businesses:
Buyer gets three names. No scroll, no choice. The call goes to one of the three named.
Fewer than 25 in 100 buyer-intent queries on a typical AI engine result in your business being cited, even when your category is well-represented in search results. That gap is what Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) closes.
Four areas. Each one a signal the engines read.
AI engines do not recommend businesses randomly. They follow structured signals: what they were trained on, what they find when searching now, and how clearly your site tells them who you are and what you do. Address all four and your citation share compounds.
Structured content
AI engines cite sources that read as published, expert analysis. Depth, accuracy, named-author authorship, and freshness all feed into whether a page is retrieved as a candidate source when someone asks a buyer-intent question.
Schema markup
Schema.org JSON-LD tells AI engines who you are, what you do, where you are located, and how you relate to other entities on the web. Most businesses have partial or broken schema. Fixing it is implementation work, not authority work, and the signal is immediate.
llms.txt and AI crawler access
The llms.txt convention is a machine-readable file at your site root that tells AI engines what your business does and how to interpret your content. It is the publisher equivalent of robots.txt, built for AI engines rather than search crawlers. Most sites do not have one.
Citation monitoring
Citation share (the percentage of relevant queries where your business is named) varies dramatically between engines. Measuring all four on a structured schedule reveals which engines are recommending you, which are not, and what changed between cycles.
AI search is not coming. It is already here.
These are the numbers that define the urgency. Not projections. Not trends. Measurements from the engines your buyers are using today.
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews each use different signals. Presence on one does not guarantee presence on any other.
When an AI engine recommends businesses in a category, the shortlist is three to five. Every business outside that set is invisible to that buyer.
Citation share is not static. It shifts with your content, your competitors, and the engines' own updates. Quarterly re-measurement is the only way to know where you stand.
Most businesses are cited on fewer than one in four buyer-intent queries even when they rank well on Google. The two measures are not the same.
A structured methodology, not a checklist.
The Qyliq approach to Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) runs in quarterly evidence cycles. Measure, fix, re-measure. Every round produces a documented record of what changed and why.
AI Citation Audit across all major engines
We probe ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews with the buyer-intent queries relevant to your category. For each query we record whether your business is cited, what it is cited for, and whether the description is accurate. The result is a baseline citation share by engine, captured as part of the Visibility Briefing.
Entity and structured-knowledge audit
We check that AI engines can reliably identify your business: your Knowledge Graph presence, the consistency of your name, address, phone number, and category description across directories, your schema markup on every relevant page, and whether your site has a valid llms.txt file. Most businesses have at least one entity-recognition gap they did not know about.
Authority Graph Audit
The Authority Graph Audit (the structured review of how your business is named in third-party sources) maps where your business appears on authoritative external sites: regulator directories, trade press, professional bodies, independent analyses. This is the signal that drives the slow, durable layer of AI citation. It cannot be purchased; it compounds through real published work.
Structured-knowledge implementation
We implement the fixes: schema markup on every relevant page, an llms.txt file tailored to your business, FAQ pages structured for AI ingestion, and factsheet pages written for retrieval rather than persuasion. This is the fastest-moving layer: changes here can affect citation share within a single evidence cycle.
Content authority strategy
We identify the queries where your business should be cited but is not, then plan the content needed to fill those gaps. Not generic SEO content: named-author analysis, structured service descriptions, and depth-first pillar pages that AI engines treat as authoritative candidate sources.
Quarterly re-measurement and Share-of-Voice Quarterly
Every 90 days we re-probe the same query set across all four engines, compare citation share to the previous cycle, and document what changed. The Share-of-Voice Quarterly (the re-measurement briefing) shows you which engines improved, which competitors moved, and what to prioritise next. A record you can read, and if needed present to colleagues.
What people
ask about AEO
Straightforward answers. If yours is not here, ask us directly.
What is Answer Engine Optimisation?
Which AI engines matter for AEO?
Can I do AEO myself?
How long does it take to appear in AI answers?
Is AEO the same as GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?
See how AI engines describe your business today
The Visibility Briefing includes a structured probe across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. You see the evidence before committing to anything.
Request a visibility briefing