Answer engine optimisation
for small businesses

What AEO means

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is a name for making your business easier for AI assistants to find, read and describe correctly. You may also see it called GEO or AI SEO. The idea is simple: more people now ask an assistant a question instead of searching, so it helps if the assistant can read your site.

The honest part

Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how an assistant chooses which sources to use or which business to mention. The methods are not published, they differ between assistants, and they change. Anyone who promises you a ranking, a mention in ChatGPT, or more traffic is guessing.

What is known is narrower: the things that help any machine reach and read a website. They cost little, and they help ordinary search too.

What is known to help machines read a site

• Crawlers can reach it. robots.txt and your host's bot settings do not block the visitors you want. How to check
• Real text in the HTML. Your key content is in the page source, not only drawn in by JavaScript after the page loads. Many automated visitors do not run JavaScript.
• Clear facts, written as text. What you do, prices, opening hours, where you are and how to contact you. Not only inside images or PDFs.
• Structured data. A short block of code that states your name, address, hours and contact details in a format machines read directly. Template
• A sitemap. A list of your pages at yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xml, so pages beyond your homepage can be found.
• Consistent details elsewhere on the web. Your name, address and phone number match across your site, maps listings and directories. Conflicting details make it harder for any system to be sure which is right.
• Clear headings and page titles. Each page says what it is about, in plain words.

Optional: llms.txt

llms.txt is a short file that points AI tools to your most useful pages. It is a proposal, not a standard, and there is little public evidence that major assistants rely on it. It is cheap to add. More on llms.txt

What we do not promise

Doing all of this does not guarantee any assistant will find you, mention you or send you customers. It removes the common reasons a machine could not read your site. That is the part you control.