What is AEO (answer engine optimization)?

AEO means optimizing for answer engines rather than for a list of links. The answer engines are ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, along with the AI summaries that now sit above ordinary search results.

A buyer who used to search for a bookkeeper near me and scan ten blue links now asks an assistant and gets a short list of names with a sentence about each. Counted from 5,174 AI answers stored in our database on 4 October 2026, the typical answer named 3 businesses, 85% of answers named 5 or fewer, and 8% named nobody at all. There is no page two to work your way onto.

If you are outside that short list, the buyer never learns you exist, and nothing shows up in your analytics to tell you it happened. AEO is the practice of being inside the list more often.

Ranking wins you a place in a list. AEO wins you a mention in a sentence. Four differences change what you work on day to day:

• There is no position 1 to 10. You are named or you are not, and the list is short: the typical answer named 3 businesses.
• The assistant builds its answer from several sources at once, so corroboration across different sites counts for more than any one page of yours.
• Answers vary between runs. Your visibility is a rate rather than a rank: named in X of 48 questions, not number four.
• There is no click in your analytics. Nothing records the buyer who asked and never saw you, so the only way to know is to ask the assistants yourself.

These labels describe one job. Answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization (GEO) and LLM SEO all mean getting named and quoted by AI assistants, and the checklist underneath each label is close to identical.

Treat them as synonyms when you read vendor pitches. Nobody needs three programs, one per acronym.

Any business customers find by asking who to hire. Bookkeepers, accountants and tax preparers, trades, clinics, salons, law firms, anyone whose buyer starts with a question rather than a brand name.

It matters most when the choice is local and considered. The buyer wants a name they can call today, so they ask for a recommendation, and the assistant hands over a short list. The firms on that list get the calls.

It matters less if your work arrives entirely by referral and nobody ever has to go looking. Even then, people check a name they have been given, and a business the assistants cannot confirm looks thinner than one they can.

Two halves: what the rest of the web says about you, and what your own site says. We put the off-site half first in our fix plans, on the reasoning that you cannot vouch for yourself. An assistant has only your word for what your site claims, and several independent sites for everything else.

• A complete Google Business Profile and a steady flow of recent reviews.
• Listings on the directories your industry uses and the assistants cite.
• Being included in the best-in-city roundup articles buyers read before they call anyone.
• Public forum threads, Reddit among them, where someone asks for a recommendation and your name gets given.
• A homepage title that states your service and your city in plain words, plus a page for each service and each topic you want to be named for.
• FAQ content written in the words buyers use, with FAQ and LocalBusiness structured data behind it, and named client results on the page.
• An llms.txt file at your site root, and robots.txt rules that allow the AI crawlers in rather than blocking them.
• A claimed and verified Bing Places listing, because ChatGPT's web search draws on Bing's index.

By counting how often you are named in answers to the questions buyers ask. That is the whole of what AI Mention Score automates: the same 48 city questions every month, the same four assistants, every answer kept word for word, reported as named in X of 48 questions.

Read the trend rather than the single run. Because answers shift between runs, a run of monthly or weekly checks tells you far more than one check ever will. The numbers that repay attention are the questions you gained and lost since last time, and which assistant started or stopped naming you.

Record who was named instead of you as well. The firms that keep appearing in the answers you are missing from show you what the assistants are rewarding in your city.

Find out whether you are named at all today, and which assistants are the problem, before you spend anything on AEO. A score of zero and a middling score call for different work, and one of the two is a lot cheaper to fix.

Run a free check: enter your website and the first run covers all four assistants, your score, who gets recommended instead of you, what each assistant said, and your first fix in full. The free plan stays free and re-checks monthly.