Fifteen per cent of all searches now happen inside AI answer engines. That number is climbing every month. I help Australian businesses show up inside ChatGPT answers, Perplexity citations, Gemini results and Google’s AI Overviews before their competitors figure out it matters.
Traditional SEO optimises your page to rank in a list of ten blue links. AEO optimises your content to be extracted and cited as part of an answer, in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews. The rules are different. The ranking signals are different. And most SEO agencies aren’t doing it yet.
Three things matter more than anything else for AEO:
Get those three right, and you start appearing inside answers your competitors can’t even see.
This isn’t a repackaged SEO audit with “AI” stamped on the cover. It’s a specific, measurable programme focused on answer engine visibility.
I test 30–50 prompts your ideal customer would ask across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AIO. You get a report showing where you currently appear, where your competitors appear, and the gap to close.
Getting the AI to recognise you as a distinct entity. Wikipedia, Wikidata, company schema, consistent brand mentions, structured “about” content. The foundation AEO is built on.
FAQ, HowTo, Product, Article, Organization, LocalBusiness, Review. Done properly, not generated-by-a-plugin-and-left-alone.
Rewriting your existing top pages into AI-extractable formats. Question-led H2s, short definitional paragraphs, explicit answers in the first two sentences, tables and comparison blocks.
Getting your brand mentioned on the sources AI models prefer to cite, Wikipedia, Reddit, niche forums, .edu and .gov mentions, industry directories. Not link farms.
Making your site readable to AI crawlers, llms.txt, robots.txt rules, clean HTML semantics, removal of JS-only content where it hurts ingestion.
More searches end inside the AI answer. If your brand isn’t in the answer, you don’t get the click, no matter where you rank.
Once a model starts citing you reliably, it tends to keep citing you. Early movers bank that advantage.
Most SMBs won’t start thinking about AEO until mid-2027. By then the positions are taken.
No, it’s an extension. Traditional SEO still drives the bulk of organic traffic. AEO is increasingly capturing a slice of that traffic at the top of the funnel. You want both.
Share-of-voice in prompt tests, citation tracking across ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini, referral traffic from AI tools (now showing in GA4), and brand-search lift. I’ll set up dashboards that track this at the start.
I can dramatically increase your chances. Nobody can guarantee a specific citation in a specific prompt, the models are probabilistic. But I can get your brand into the corpus the model is drawing from.
Usually bundled. AEO and traditional SEO share a lot of underlying work (entity, schema, content quality). Most clients get both in one retainer.