Answer Engine Optimization

Be the answer, not the fourth blue link

The result page stopped being a list. AI Overviews, featured snippets and voice assistants now compose one answer and name one or two brands. AEO is the discipline of making sure the composed answer contains yours.

Check my answer coverage

See the method

~60%

of searches now end without a click to any website

1–2

brands typically named inside a single composed answer

412

prompts we sample nightly to see who gets named

What changed underneath you

Position one is not the top of the page

Above your ranking sits a synthesised answer assembled from several sources. If you are not one of them, your #1 position is below the fold of the decision.

Answers are extracted, not ranked

The engine is looking for a clean, self-contained, attributable passage. Pages written as long persuasive essays give it nothing liftable, no matter how good they are.

III

The question is the unit, not the keyword

Buyers type sentences now. We map the full question space of your category — including the awkward, comparative and objection-shaped ones your marketing avoids — and cover it deliberately.

The test

Could a model quote one paragraph of this page, out of context, and be correct, specific and unambiguous about who said it?

If the answer is no, the page cannot be cited — only summarised. Summaries do not carry your name.

Self-contained passages

Unambiguous attribution

Answer-first order

The AEO system

We assemble the real question space from search data, sales-call transcripts, support tickets, Reddit threads and direct prompting of the engines themselves. Then we score each question by commercial value and by how contested the answer currently is. That intersection is your roadmap.

Prompt mining

Sales-call transcripts

Contest scoring

The claim in the first forty words. Definitions that stand alone. Comparison tables an engine can parse. Lists where the list is the answer, not decoration. We restructure existing high-intent pages before writing new ones — the fastest wins are usually already published.

Forty-word answers

Standalone definitions

Parsable tables

Facts placed near stable anchors, unique data the engine cannot source elsewhere, clear author and organisation entities, and schema that removes ambiguity about who is speaking. When the model needs a source, you want to be the least effortful one to name.

Stable anchors

Unique facts

Author entities

Schema

Your question set is sampled across five engines every night. You see which questions name you, which cite you without naming, and which name a competitor — with the actual answer text, not a score. Gaps become the next sprint.

5 engines

Answer text captured

Gap-to-sprint loop

Where answers get composed

Each surface has its own extraction behaviour. We treat them separately because they behave separately.

Google

AI Overviews

Synthesised above everything, drawing from a handful of sources it considers settled. Hardest to enter, most valuable to hold.

Sampled nightly.

Google

Featured snippets

Still the training ground: if you cannot win a snippet on a question, you rarely make the Overview for it either.

Structure-driven, winnable fast.

Perplexity

Cited answers

The most attribution-friendly surface. Numbered sources, visible, clickable — and heavily weighted toward original data.

Our best-performing surface.

Voice

Spoken results

One answer, no list, no second place. Requires the shortest, most declarative version of your claim to exist somewhere.

Often overlooked, cheap to win.

The first ninety days

Baseline reading

Your question set sampled across five engines. You see exactly where you stand before we touch anything.

Week 1

Question map

The full space, scored by value and contest. Agreement on the first thirty questions to own.

Week 2

Restructure what exists

Answer-first rewrites of pages already ranking. The fastest movement in the whole engagement.

Week 3–5

Publish into gaps

New pages for uncontested high-value questions, each carrying original information.

Week 5–12

Hold the position

Nightly sampling, monthly refresh, and a defence sprint whenever a competitor takes a question back.

Ongoing

Find out which answers already name you

Send your ten most valuable buyer questions. We run them across five engines and send back the answer text, who gets named, and what it would take to be you instead.

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