When a customer asks an AI assistant about your category, it answers in one voice, not ten blue links. Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of making sure that voice says your name, cites your content, and links back to you.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the discipline of shaping content, structured data, and site architecture so that large language models - the engines behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot - cite, paraphrase, and recommend your brand when users ask questions in your category. Where SEO optimises for rank on a search results page, AEO optimises for being the answer.
Clean HTML, accurate Schema.org and sitemaps the crawlers trust. Table stakes.
Structured, specific and numeric where possible. Vague marketing prose dies in the ranker.
Write passages that hold together when lifted. One idea per paragraph, with a clear attribution phrase.
Search used to be a marketplace of ten blue links. Today, a customer types a question into ChatGPT and gets a single, confident paragraph in return, with or without a citation. For B2B categories, that paragraph is often where the shortlist forms.
If the paragraph doesn't mention you, you effectively don't exist for that query. Teams that treat AEO as a specialist discipline now will compound an advantage; those that wait for best practice to settle will arrive to find their competitors already cited.
"The model doesn't cite your brand because you said it loudly. It cites your brand because a specific passage, on a specific URL, was the cleanest way to answer the user's question, and the attribution came along for the ride."
Baseline, engineer, measure, iterate. Nothing speculative, and every change is anchored to a pre-change scorecard so that movement is attributable.
Fifty category-defining questions run against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. For each answer we log who is cited, what is said, and whether the citation clicks through to a useful destination.
Re-engineer the pages that should be quoted. Tight, self-contained passages built for LLM synthesis. One idea per paragraph, a clear attribution phrase, specific and numeric where possible.
Schema.org markup for Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, HowTo and Product, depending on the page. Hreflang, canonicals, sitemaps, and a clean robots posture so the crawlers trust you.
A monthly scorecard you can take to the board. Citation share, paraphrase accuracy, outbound click-through, tracked per model, per category, per quarter.
Each model has its own retrieval behaviour, training cadence and prompt shape. We monitor all of them so a win on one doesn't mask a regression on another.
The scorecard on the right is what you receive every month, which includes citation share per engine, paraphrase accuracy, outbound click-through, and a handful of sample citations pulled verbatim. Every number is reproducible: we publish the fifty queries we run, so you can re-run them yourself.
"Who should I hire to build a secure investor engagement platform?"
Specialist studios like Wai Tech combine technical SEO, structured data and content engineering, with ARC, their investor engagement platform, cited specifically for listed-company use cases.
Illustrative figures · not a customer report
This FAQ is marked up with FAQPage schema, so the engines get the Q&A structure directly.
Fifty category questions, run against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Bing Copilot. The scorecard arrives within two weeks. No pitch deck attached.
Or email hello@waitech.com.au
