AEO
AEO: answer engine optimisation
Answer engine optimisation is the work of getting a business named, described accurately and cited when someone asks an AI model a question instead of running a search. The answer is assembled from sources the model retrieved, so the work is making sure those sources exist, agree with each other, and say the right thing.
What AEO actually changes
An answer engine does not rank pages. It retrieves a handful of sources, reconciles what they say, and writes one answer. The unit of work is therefore not a page’s position but whether a claim about the business is present, consistent and retrievable.
In our tracking of 4,222 answers in one category, three factors separated the businesses that were named from the ones that were not. The strongest was consistency: businesses whose facts matched across their site, their listings and their reviews were repeated, while businesses with conflicting facts were hedged or dropped.
The second was where those sources live. The third-party sources carrying the client produced 18,742 retrievals against 4,319 from the client’s own website.
What AEO is not
It is not search engine optimisation renamed. SEO works on rank within a list of links, and an answer engine returns no list.
It is not a monitoring dashboard. Reading what the models say is the first step and we run that tracking daily, but a chart describes the problem rather than fixing it.
It is not content volume. A page that answers one question completely is retrieved; six pages that answer it partially are not.
How we run it
Four steps, in order. We run the questions a business’s customers actually ask on every major model and record whether the business is named, what is said, and the source behind each claim. We reconcile every fact to one version across the site, its structured data and every listing that describes it. We publish one page per customer question, with the answer in the opening paragraph. Then we claim, correct and earn placement in the third-party sources the models retrieve in that category.
The order matters, because a fact conflict poisons everything downstream of it.
What it moves, and how we report it
Visibility is the share of relevant answers that name the business. Share of voice is its share of all company mentions across those answers. Position is its rank among the businesses an answer names. We report all three by model and by stage of the customer journey.
Those describe standing rather than value, so every answer that names a business is traced through to the visit it produced and whether that visitor became a customer. Published measurements put the value of an AI search visit at 4.4 times a traditional organic visit (Semrush, July 2025), and Adobe Analytics measured AI-referred retail traffic converting 54% better than other channels by May 2026.
Frequently asked questions
How long does AEO take to show results? In our average engagement, share of voice moves from single digits to first place in the category within three months. Visibility moves first, usually once newly published pages begin to be cited; share of voice follows as competitors lose mentions.
Which models does SourceNode cover? ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Perplexity, checked daily.
Can a business run AEO in-house? Yes, and we publish the method so a team can. It takes running the prompt set on every model on a schedule, reading each answer against a verified fact set, and chasing the source behind every wrong claim. Most teams manage the first audit. Few keep it running.
Is AEO the same as GEO? They overlap. AEO is generally used for whether a business is cited by an answer engine, GEO for how it is described in generated content. We treat them as one practice, because the same sources decide both.