Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

A growing share of buyers now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who to consider before they ever type a search. When the assistant answers, it names a handful of companies, and there's no line in the analytics for the deal that never started because yours wasn't one of them.

Most sites are invisible in those answers. Not because the work isn't good, but because nothing about the site tells a model what the company is, who it serves or why it can be trusted. That's the gap AEO closes.

We start by writing down the questions your company should be the answer to, then ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity those questions and record what comes back. The work then runs on two tracks. One makes the site legible: schema, headings, llms.txt, sitemaps. The other makes the content citable: direct answers, named authors, evidence sitting next to every claim. Then we ask the assistants again, monthly, and track what changes.

Forest's structured data went from one generic tag to a full JSON-LD layer across every template, with alt text enforced in the CMS. That's the technical half of AEO done at scale: a site search engines and answer engines can read as a clear structure.

AEO is part of the Optimisation retainer, from £5,000 a month. It covers a visibility audit against your target questions, structured data and technical fixes, llms.txt and sitemap setup, content rewritten to answer questions directly, author and entity signals, and monthly citation tracking across the major assistants.

The aim is straightforward: when a buyer asks an assistant who to consider in your category, your company is part of the answer. The same clarity tends to lift search rankings too, because both reward pages that answer the question they were asked. And since most competitors aren't doing this work yet, starting early counts for more than it usually does.