Your buyers are asking AI who to use. Right now it isn't saying you.
We measure whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini name your brand when an Australian buyer asks for a business like yours — then we go and change the answer. Measured monthly against a fixed prompt set, reported whether it moved or not.
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Why this matters now, in numbers
That last number is the opportunity and the warning. This category has no established answer yet — in Australia, in most industries, the AI answer is still up for grabs. It will not stay that way.
What we do differently
We don't sell schema markup as an AI visibility service. It is the headline deliverable in most AEO retainers and the best available evidence says it does nothing on its own — Ahrefs tested 1,885 pages and measured a citation change statistically indistinguishable from zero on every engine. We still implement it, because it helps machines parse your pages. We just won't charge you $5,000 a month for it and call it the work.
We spend the budget where the evidence points instead:
- Earned third-party coverage — the single biggest lever. Earned media beats brand-owned content by roughly 325% for AI citation rates.
- Entity clarity — deep, consistent identity signals across authoritative sources. In one 90-day controlled study this produced a +34% citation lift overall and +52% on Gemini and Bing.
- Getting onto the lists engines actually read — the "best X in Australia" roundups, directories and review profiles that answer engines quote. Brands with no active review profile appeared in 1% of answers; brands that actively collected and responded to reviews appeared in 75.3%.
- Extractable content — answer-first structure, real statistics, quotable expert lines. The Princeton GEO study measured lifts of roughly 41% for quotations, 32% for statistics and 30% for inline citations.
- Nothing gated. In the same 90-day study, two gated whitepapers earned 14 citations while open equivalents on the same topics earned 1,847.
Every one of those numbers, with its source →
How an engagement runs
- Baseline. We build a prompt set from how your buyers actually ask, run it across the major engines, and record who gets cited today. You get the file, not a score out of 100.
- Gap and plan. Which sources the engines are quoting for your category, which ones you are absent from, and what it would take to be in them.
- Execution. Earned placements, entity work, review presence, content rebuilt to be quotable.
- Re-measure monthly. Same prompts, same method, and we tell you if it didn't work.
Start with the free snapshot
Tell us the one question a customer would ask an AI to find a business like yours. We will run it and send back what the engines say today, who they cite instead of you, and whether there is anything here worth paying for. No call, no deck.
Common questions
What is answer engine optimisation?
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of getting a brand named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question, rather than when they type a keyword into Google. It is also called generative engine optimisation (GEO). In practice the two terms mean the same thing.
Does schema markup improve AI citations?
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.
What actually gets a brand cited by ChatGPT?
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.
How much does AEO cost in Australia?
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. Enterprise programmes reach $10,000 to $25,000 a month. We publish our own numbers on the pricing page rather than making you ask.
Can you guarantee my brand will appear in ChatGPT?
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.