A B2B buyer looking for a supplier used to type a few words into Google and read the results. Increasingly they ask an AI assistant instead: "what are the options for X for a company our size?" The assistant answers in a paragraph, names a handful of companies, and sometimes cites where it got that from.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of being in that paragraph. It is newer than SEO and noisier, and a lot of what is sold under the name is either ordinary SEO with a new label or promises nobody can keep. This is what we think it actually involves.
What answer engines seem to reward
Nobody outside the companies that build these systems knows exactly how a source gets chosen, and the systems change. What follows is what reliably helps, not a formula.
A clear answer to a specific question. Pages that state the answer early and plainly are easier to quote than pages that circle a topic for a thousand words before saying anything. If a buyer would ask it as a question, the page should answer it as one.
Real expertise. A model summarising a category draws on sources that sound like they come from people who do the work: specific, concrete, willing to say where something does not apply. Generic content written to fill a keyword is exactly what both search engines and answer engines are learning to skip.
Structure that is easy to parse. Clean headings, short sections, lists where a list is the honest format, and structured data on the page. Much of this is plain good SEO, and it is no accident that the two overlap.
Being findable in the first place. Answer engines that search the web before answering still depend on pages being indexed and crawlable. Content nobody can reach cannot be cited.
What to publish
For a B2B company, the best AEO content usually comes from sales calls. The questions prospects ask before they buy are the questions they also ask an AI assistant:
- what the options are in your category, and how they differ
- what it costs, or what drives the cost
- how long it takes and what the client has to provide
- when your kind of product is the wrong choice
That last one matters more than it seems. A page that honestly says who should not buy from you is unusually citable, because it reads like advice rather than marketing.
The substance has to come from you. We draft with AI from a short monthly interview or notes, and a person edits every piece for accuracy and voice before you approve it. AI makes the drafting faster; it cannot supply the point of view.
How to track it
You cannot see an answer engine's rankings the way you can see Google's, but you can sample them. The approach is simple:
- Write down the questions your buyers ask, in their words.
- Ask them, regularly, in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers.
- Record whether you are named or cited, who is named instead, and which pages the citations point to.
Our Growth and Full-Funnel plans track 25 buyer questions every month this way, alongside ordinary search rankings, so the next month's content follows what is and is not getting picked up.
Why no one can guarantee citations
Some providers do guarantee AEO results, usually with conditions attached. Others, like Discovered Labs, explicitly refuse to, on the grounds that AI search is probabilistic. We agree with the second camp.
The same question can produce a different answer an hour later. Models are updated without notice. The sources an engine trusts this quarter may not be the ones it trusts next quarter. Anyone promising that you will be cited in a particular answer is promising something outside their control.
What can be promised is the work: a steady supply of content that answers real questions, structured properly, tracked honestly, and adjusted based on what the tracking shows.
Where AEO fits
AEO compounds slowly, over months. That is why we pair content with outbound rather than selling it alone: outbound produces conversations now, and content builds behind it, giving prospects something worth reading when they look you up and giving answer engines something worth citing when buyers ask.
The content and AEO service describes the monthly output in detail, and the pricing page shows which plans include it.