AEO services: find out who ChatGPT recommends instead of you

An answer engine is an AI tool that writes one answer instead of giving you a list of links: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode. When someone asks one of these for a business like yours, it names a few and cites its sources. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of measuring whether you're one of the names, and changing the inputs if you're not.

AEO services are answer engine optimisation: the work of getting a business named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews for a recommendation, rather than when they type a keyword into Google. The same work is sold as AI SEO and as generative engine optimisation (GEO). In practice the three terms describe one job.

Yes, for buying purposes. "AI SEO" is the term most Australian buyers search for and "AEO" or "GEO" is what practitioners tend to write. All three mean measuring and improving how often AI engines name and cite your business. The differences are mostly marketing. The one real distinction is with traditional SEO, which is about ranking your own pages rather than being quoted in an answer.

On its own, no. Ahrefs ran a matched difference-in-differences study on 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema and found citation changes of -4.6% in Google AI Overviews, +2.4% in AI Mode and +2.2% in ChatGPT — all statistically indistinguishable from zero. Schema helps machines parse a page, but it is not what makes an answer engine recommend a brand.

Third-party coverage, mostly. A University of Toronto study found AI search shows a systematic bias toward earned media over brand-owned content, with earned media outperforming owned content by roughly 325% for citation rates. Entity clarity across trusted sources and having content that is easy to extract and quote come next.

What other agencies charge: mid-market retainers in this category run about $3,000 to $8,000 a month, with one-off audits between $1,500 and $5,000, and enterprise programmes reach $10,000 to $25,000 a month. Our own prices are published: $2,500 + GST for a fixed audit and $3,500 to $7,500 a month + GST for a programme.

No, and neither can anyone else. AI answers are non-deterministic and the providers change their retrieval systems without notice. What can be done is measuring citation share across a fixed prompt set over time, and moving the inputs that evidence says matter. We report the measurement whether it moved or not.

You get an email within two business days. It shows what each engine said, who it named, the sources it used, and one short paragraph on whether there's anything worth doing. That's it. No call unless you ask for one, and we don't add you to a list. If the engines already name you, we'll say so and you're done. If there's a gap and you want it measured properly, the audit ($2,500 + GST, ten business days) runs 30–50 questions and gives you a costed action list.

Fair question. We've been live since September 2026, and the engines don't cite us yet. Our score is 0 across 29 buyer questions, and we publish it every month. Two things to weigh. The snapshot and the audit are measurement: you get the stored answers and the sources for your questions, and they're right whether or not anyone cites us. And we're running the same method on ourselves, in public, so you can watch whether our score moves before you pay for the programme. If it doesn't move, that tells you something too.