Search is no longer only a results page. A growing share of commercial questions never produce a click — they produce an answer, written by Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or a Google AI Overview. If those systems cannot read the business as a fact, they will not name it. They will name a competitor they can cite, or they will stay silent.
Answer Engine Optimization is the work of making a business machine-readable and citable. It is not a promise that ChatGPT will mention you. Anyone selling that guarantee is selling something they do not control. The deliverable is architecture: entity, schema, llms.txt, citations, and canonical copy an assistant can stand behind — then a measurement of whether naming actually happens.
How we engage
- To start
- $4,999
- Then
- $175 / hour
- Plus
- API usage and any cost associated with the work is billed through. We do not mark it up as a surprise line — it is named in the proposal.
- Horizon
- typically 4–6 months
- After
- Website care & marketing from $1,499 / month · Software care & marketing from $1,999 / month
Project-shaped growth work — AEO, technical SEO, custom marketing software, content systems — uses Software Development terms. Ongoing marketing sits on website care & marketing or software care & marketing.
What AEO is, and what it is not
AEO is not a new name for blog posts. It is the discipline of giving an answer engine a source it can trust: a consistent entity, structured data that matches the visible page, a machine-readable site graph, and off-site citations that agree with each other. The test is simple. Ask an assistant who does the work. If it cannot name you, the page was not written for it.
It is also not a replacement for technical SEO. Crawl, index, and information architecture still decide whether a search engine can choose you. AEO sits beside that work. Search position is one signal. Whether an assistant will name the practice is the other. Both are in scope on Search, Answers & Growth.
What the program actually produces
Entity and sameAs hygiene so the business is one thing across the site, the Business Profile, and the directories that matter. Schema that restates what the page already says — never a fabricated LocalBusiness, never a Dubai address the practice does not have. An llms.txt (and, where it earns it, an llms-full.txt) that tells AI crawlers who you are and which URLs to cite. A citation pass: NAP consistency, directory presence, knowledge-graph hygiene.
Then measurement. We probe the assistants a buyer actually uses and record whether they name the business, who they name instead, and what a miss implies for the next brief. The client can export the log. There is no rented pixel and no black-box dashboard the vendor can reprice.
Honesty about outcomes
A mention is an outcome we can observe, not a deliverable we can contract. Models change, retrieval changes, and a competitor with a decade of citations will be named first for a long time. The work is to make naming possible, then to keep the source graph honest so that when an engine reaches, it has something true to hold.
We will not install third-party trackers, retargeting tags, or session replay to 'prove' the program. We will not run paid ads under this offering. If the motion you need is a media buy, we will say so rather than stretch AEO into a campaign.
How it sits next to the site
Websites & Apps still builds the site. This program is the discovery layer after it ships — or an honest audit of a site we did not build, before we touch schema. If the underlying pages are thin, contradictory, or uncrawlable, we say that first. AEO on a broken site is decoration.
Project-shaped AEO uses Software terms. Ongoing marketing sits on website care and marketing or software care and marketing — not a separate growth product. Custom marketing software is the path when the measurement itself needs to be a system the client owns.