Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
Helping your brand be seen by AI, not just search engines
Tell your story with authenticity
Search is evolving. Discovery is conversational.
AI is the new gatekeeper.
The rise of AI-powered assistants is fundamentally shifting how people discover brands, products, and services. Increasingly, the journey starts with a prompt – not a keyword. And the answer often comes back in a sentence or two, not ten blue links.
Tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity pull from content that is well-structured, trustworthy, and clear. They favour websites that speak with authority, cite their sources, and use structured data to help machines understand them. If your site isn’t built for that, you’re invisible.
AEO is how you stay discoverable. It’s the evolution of SEO — tailored for an AI-first world.
What is AEO?
Make your content visible, readable, and recommendable - not just indexable.
The way people search is changing. Traditional SEO was built for search engines. But in 2025, many users are bypassing Google altogether and asking tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, Claude, and Gemini for direct answers and recommendations.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is about making your brand appear in these AI-generated responses. When people ask things like “What’s the best charity CRM?”, “Which sustainable brands ship to the UK?”, or “Top agencies for brand films?”. Unlike SEO, which aims to get you on page one, AEO is about getting your content cited, summarised, and recommended by AI assistants.
AEO at The Story Goes
We help you structure your site, improve your authority, and create the kind of content AI tools trust and surface - making sure your business is still visible in a post-search world.
Why hire us as your AEO partner?
We don’t just tweak metadata.
We optimise your entire digital presence to be readable, trustworthy, and recommendable to AI systems.
- Entity-first content modelling:
Structure your site around recognised people, places, organisations and concepts — the way large language models understand the world. - Content that earns citations:
We write and optimise long-form, well-sourced content that tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT are more likely to quote, reference, or summarise. - Rich structured data:
Add structured metadata to pages (like FAQs, how-tos, org info) that help AI models confidently extract and validate your information. - Factual depth and transparency:
Avoid vague marketing fluff — we help you publish detailed, helpful content with sources, examples, and supporting links. - Clear authorship:
AI tools factor in transparency and trust. We make sure your content has clear authorship, company bios, and “about” pages that establish authority. - Consistent, up-to-date publishing:
AI models surface content that’s actively maintained. We help you publish a stream of current, relevant material that shows you’re alive and credible. - Crawl and retrieval readiness:
Tools like Perplexity use real-time web crawlers. We ensure your site is accessible, fast-loading, and properly indexed for real-time AI retrieval. - Zero-click optimised formatting:
We format content in bite-sized, answer-friendly styles so it’s more easily used in AI-generated responses.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is AEO the same as SEO?
- Not quite. SEO is still important, but AEO goes a step further: optimising your content for discovery by AI assistants that summarise and recommend, rather than rank and list.
- Which AI tools does this apply to?
- AEO targets all major AI discovery platforms — including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity.ai, Gemini, Copilot and future tools that use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to source answers from the open web.
- Do we need this if we already have SEO support?
- Yes, most traditional SEO strategies aren’t built for AI recommendations. AEO complements your SEO by preparing your site for the next generation of content discovery.
- Is AEO just for content-heavy businesses?
- No, if your audience is asking questions online, you need to be in the answers. That includes B2B, B2C, SaaS, retail, non-profits and everything in between.
Let’s make your content work smarter
- Book a call to explore how AEO can make your brand discoverable in an AI-first world. We’d love to hear what challenges you're facing.
