Frequently Asked Questions

Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a company likely to be named and cited inside answers generated by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, rather than merely ranked in a list of links. It works on three things: a resolvable entity, content formatted so passages can be extracted, and corroboration on sources those systems already trust.

They share a foundation and diverge above it. Crawlable server-rendered HTML, clean information architecture and genuine subject-matter depth serve both. The divergence is in what is rewarded: search rewards relevance and links, answer engines reward entity clarity, quotable statements and agreement across independent sources.

The practical test is simple. If your page ranks first and no assistant names you when asked the same question, the gap is AEO, not SEO.

The technical and entity layer is a matter of weeks and is fully within your control. Being named more often is slower, because it depends on corroboration across sources you do not own — directories, reviews, community discussion, third-party coverage. Plan on a quarter for the first clear movement in a soft market and considerably longer in a contested one.

Publish it — it costs twenty minutes and it is a reasonable bet on agentic retrieval. Do not buy it as a ranking lever. Google has stated on the record that it does not use it, and crawler-log analysis shows the major AI bots overwhelmingly fetch HTML directly instead. Anyone selling llms.txt as an AI ranking factor is telling you something about their reading, not about the file.

A fixed prompt set, run monthly across five answer surfaces, with every response stored verbatim and dated. The metrics are mention rate, citation rate and share of voice against named competitors. Traffic is a poor proxy here, because an assistant can recommend you without sending a click.

Prices for the audit, the build and the ongoing monitoring retainer are published on the pricing page. We publish them because the cost question is one of the highest-intent queries in this category and almost nobody answers it.

Three things that used to be separate jobs: it makes a company legible to AI systems, it builds the automation and agents that change how the company works internally, and it measures both. An agency that only writes content is a content agency, and an agency that only builds agents cannot tell you whether anyone can find you.

Good SEO is most of the technical foundation, so you are ahead. What it does not give you is entity corroboration or extractable answer formatting, and those are what decide whether a model names you. The most common finding in our audits is a site that ranks well and is never mentioned by an assistant.

Because the cost question is one of the highest-intent things a buyer searches for, and almost nobody in this category answers it. A page that says only "request a quote" ranks for nothing and gets cited by nothing. You also arrive at the first call already knowing whether we are in the same range, which saves us both a meeting.

Because the range is genuinely wide and a single number would mislead you. What we can publish is what drives the cost, so you can place yourself in a band before you talk to anyone. That is on this page.

Monitoring retainers run with a minimum term because moving AI citations takes longer than a month and a one-month engagement would take your money and prove nothing. Audits and build projects are fixed-fee with no ongoing commitment.