Answer Engine Optimisation: What It Is, Why It Matters, and Why You're Already Behind
For twenty-five years, the question was: "How do we rank on Google?" That question is no longer sufficient. A growing share of your potential customers never reach a search results page at all. They ask ChatGPT. They ask Perplexity. They ask Claude or Gemini. And those engines give them an answer, often with a brand recommendation attached.
Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is the discipline of ensuring your brand is the one that gets cited.
What AEO Actually Is
AEO is the practice of structuring your brand's digital presence so that large language models and AI-powered search engines reference, recommend, and cite your organisation when users ask relevant questions.
This is not a rebrand of SEO. It is a distinct discipline with overlapping inputs. SEO concerns itself with ranking in a list of ten blue links. AEO concerns itself with being the named answer in a conversational response.
The distinction matters because the selection mechanisms are different. Google's algorithm weighs over 200 ranking factors in a broadly understood framework. AI answer engines use a combination of training data, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and real-time web access to decide which sources to trust and cite. The weighting is opaque, but the signals are becoming clearer.
Why It Matters Now
The numbers tell the story. As of early 2026, ChatGPT processes over 1 billion queries per week. Perplexity handles roughly 150 million. Google's own AI Overviews now appear on approximately 40% of informational queries. Microsoft Copilot is embedded in every Windows desktop and every Teams meeting.
These are not niche tools. They are primary interfaces for a growing segment of high-value decision-makers, precisely the people most companies want to reach.
When a procurement director asks Perplexity "What are the best enterprise CRM platforms for mid-market companies?", the answer comes with specific brand names. If yours is not among them, you have lost that opportunity before your sales team even knew it existed.
How AI Engines Select Which Brands to Cite
The mechanics vary by engine, but the common signals fall into five categories:
- Topical authority: Does your site demonstrate deep, consistent expertise on the subject? A single blog post will not suffice. AI engines favour sources that have covered a topic extensively, with depth and consistency over time.
- Third-party validation: Are other authoritative sources citing, linking to, or mentioning your brand in relevant contexts? This includes backlinks, press coverage, industry reports, and academic citations.
- Content structure: Is your content organised in a way that AI systems can parse and extract? Structured data, clear heading hierarchies, and well-defined entity relationships all contribute.
- Recency and freshness: AI engines give weight to content that is current. A guide published in 2021 and never updated is less likely to be cited than one updated in the past six months.
- Brand entity strength: Does your brand exist as a recognised entity in the knowledge graphs that AI systems reference? This is a function of mentions across the web, Wikipedia presence, Wikidata entries, and consistent NAP (name, address, phone) data.
The Competitive Window
Here is the part that should concern you: the window for establishing AEO authority is open, but it is closing. AI engines form default associations. Once Perplexity consistently recommends three brands in your category, displacing one of them becomes exponentially harder.
The parallel is instructive. Between 2005 and 2010, companies that invested seriously in SEO built positions that many still hold today. The cost of catching up now is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of being early.
AEO is at that same inflection point. The brands building authority now will be the default citations when AI search becomes the primary discovery channel. And based on current adoption curves, that shift is 18 to 36 months away for most B2B categories.
What This Means for Your Organisation
If you are a CEO, this is a strategic visibility risk. Your competitors may already be positioning for AI citations while your marketing team is still optimising meta descriptions.
If you are a CMO, this is an execution challenge. AEO requires coordination between content strategy, technical SEO, PR, and product marketing. It cannot be delegated to a junior SEO analyst.
If you are an investor, this is a due diligence factor. A portfolio company with strong AI visibility is worth more than one that depends entirely on paid channels and traditional search rankings. We have written separately about the investment implications.
The Starting Point
The first step is knowing where you stand. Which AI engines currently cite your brand? For which queries? How do you compare to your direct competitors?
Most organisations cannot answer these questions, which is precisely why we built our AEO practice around answering them. Our Answer Engine Optimisation service begins with a full citation audit across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini, then builds the authority infrastructure that gets your brand recommended.