Straightanswers.
The questions I get asked before every engagement, answered the way I would answer them on a call.
What is answer engine optimization, and how is it different from SEO?
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the work of becoming the source an AI model cites when it answers a question, rather than a link someone clicks. The technical foundations overlap heavily with SEO: crawlability, structure, authority. The emphasis is what differs. Models need unambiguous entities, machine readable claims, and corroboration from sources they already trust. I run both together, because AI engines largely draw on what classic search has already validated.
How do you measure AI search visibility?
With a fixed set of buyer questions, run repeatedly across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. Each run is scored on whether you are mentioned, cited, or recommended, and against whom. That becomes a baseline you can actually move. On my current engagement that programme took AI citations from a zero baseline past 62,000.
What is a citation gap, and why does it beat search volume?
A citation gap is a question your buyers ask where a competitor gets cited and you do not. I map those by running target prompts across the engines and recording which sources come back. The roadmap is then sequenced by citation gap rather than raw volume, because a low volume question that feeds an AI recommendation can be worth more than a high volume term that never reaches a buyer.
How long before I see results?
Technical and on page fixes tend to move inside 30 to 60 days. Content and authority compound over three to six months. AI citations sit in between, because entity and schema work can surface in answers faster than rankings move. You are correcting how a model understands you rather than out competing a page. Anyone promising a fixed date is guessing.
What does the automation actually do?
It removes the manual reporting and monitoring that usually eats a search team. I build agents wired directly to Search Console, GA4, SE Ranking, Bing Webmaster and DataForSEO, so they read live data instead of stale exports. They handle content refresh, decay pruning, anomaly detection, publishing and reporting. I have shipped more than twenty.
Do you take retainers or fixed scope projects?
Both. Fixed scope suits audits, migrations, schema work and programmatic builds. Retainers suit content and authority, which only compound with time. Most people start with an audit and decide from there. The audit call is free and you keep the findings either way.
Still have a question?
Ask it directly. I answer every enquiry myself, usually within one working day.