Every week a business owner asks me a version of the same question: “How do I show up in ChatGPT the way I used to show up on Google?”

It’s a fair question. The honest answer is: it’s early, nobody fully knows, and most of the “AEO experts” on LinkedIn are guessing like the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do. I’ve been running experiments on my own projects and clients’ sites since early 2024, and there are a handful of moves that consistently work. This is the guide I wish someone had written me two years ago.

What AEO actually is

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the discipline of making your content, data and brand easy for large language models to retrieve, quote and cite. Traditional SEO optimises for a ranked list of blue links. AEO optimises for a sentence inside an AI-generated answer, usually with your brand name and a source link next to it.

Some people call it GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). Some call it LLMO. I use AEO because it’s older terminology and I’m not keen on inventing acronyms for the sake of it.

Why this matters now

Google’s AI Overviews are now appearing for a large slice of informational queries in Australia. ChatGPT’s search feature cites sources for most of its answers. Perplexity was built on the premise. Even traditional Google search results have structured answer boxes above the organic links.

If your business gets mentioned in those answers, you get free, high-intent visibility before the user has even clicked. If your competitor gets mentioned and you don’t, you’re quietly losing mind-share every single day.

The six things that actually move the needle

1. Entity clarity

LLMs think in entities, not keywords. If the model doesn’t have a clear sense of “Zakria Azeem is a Australian SEO specialist with 15 years experience who works with SMBs,” it can’t cite me. Fix this by:

• Writing a single, clear About page that spells out who you are, where you’re based, what you do, who you work with.
• Adding proper Organization schema and Person schema with sameAs links to LinkedIn, Facebook, Crunchbase, any professional directory you’re actually listed in.
• Making sure your business name appears on every page the same way, every time, not “ZA Digital” on one page and “Zakria Azeem Marketing” on another.

2. Plain, quotable sentences

Go read your homepage and your top service pages. Now imagine you were Perplexity trying to answer “who is a good SEO specialist Australia-wide?” in one sentence. Could you quote anything on your page verbatim and have it make sense?

Most small-business pages fail this test. They’re full of fluff (“elevating digital experiences through cutting-edge innovation”) and nothing an LLM can actually snip into an answer. Rewrite with short, declarative sentences that describe specific things. Not “we deliver results” but “we helped 12 Australian eCommerce stores grow organic revenue by more than 100% in 2025.”

3. Getting mentioned on sources LLMs trust

This is the uncomfortable bit. LLMs are trained on, and retrieve from, a specific set of sources more than others. In Australia, that means mentions in:

• Reddit threads (especially r/AusFinance, r/smallbusiness, r/AustralianSEO if it existed more actively, r/Entrepreneur)
• Quora answers
• Established industry publications (Smart Company, AdNews, B&T)
• Podcast transcripts (huge and underrated)
• LinkedIn posts, especially ones that get shared
• Wikipedia, if you can earn a mention legitimately
• Niche listicles like “best X Australia-wide” type content that ranks organically

The goal isn’t links for PageRank anymore. The goal is being mentioned by name in enough places that the model has learnt you exist and what you do.

4. Answering real questions directly

Open Answer The Public. Open Reddit’s search. Open AlsoAsked. Find the actual questions your target customers are typing into ChatGPT right now. Then write pages that answer those questions, clearly, specifically, with a direct answer in the first 100 words.

The old SEO playbook of “write 2,500 words, stuff keywords, wait 8 months” still works for some queries. But AEO rewards a different shape of content: a direct answer at the top, supported by evidence below, with clear headings so the model can find the bit it wants.

5. Structured data (yes, still)

People keep declaring schema dead. It isn’t. FAQ schema, How-To schema, Product schema, and Organization schema all still help both classic search and AI retrieval. You don’t need every schema type under the sun. You need the ones relevant to your content, implemented cleanly, validated, and kept up to date.

6. Freshness and revisions

LLMs tend to prefer recently-updated content for time-sensitive queries. If you wrote a great guide in 2023 and haven’t touched it since, update it. Change the year in the title. Rewrite the intro. Add a note at the top explaining what’s new.

You don’t need to publish new content every week. You need to keep your best existing content alive.

How to actually measure this

This is still primitive. I use a combination of:

• Manual prompt testing. Every fortnight I run the same 15-20 prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, and log whether the client is mentioned, what’s said about them, and whether the source link is clean.
• Referrer traffic from AI tools. Turn on AI-specific UTM parameters or check GA4 for traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, etc.
• Third-party tools. Profound, Peec AI, Nightwatch’s GenAI feature, and a few others are maturing fast. Expect this category to explode in 2026.

What I tell clients

AEO is not a replacement for SEO. It’s an extension of it. If you’ve already done the boring fundamentals, fast site, clean structure, good pages, some authority, then AEO is a set of high-leverage moves on top. If your site is a broken mess and you’ve never ranked for anything, doing “AEO” first is like painting a car with no engine.

Start with the basics. Get entity clarity. Get quotable sentences. Get mentions on Reddit and in real publications. Then measure what’s actually happening in AI answers. That’s 80% of the game.

, Zakria