Nobody briefs their agency on AEO. That's rather the point: by the time it's obvious enough to ask for, the advantage is gone.
AEO is the discipline of structuring your business so AI engines, including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini and AI Overviews, recognise you as the authoritative answer in your category.
We brought this to our clients before they asked. That's how we work generally, and this is the clearest example of it.
Traditional SEO is about ranking in a list of links. AEO is about becoming the answer that AI tools serve before the link list even appears.
When someone asks ChatGPT “what is the best marketing agency in Gold Coast?” or asks Google's AI Overview “who does Google Ads management in Brisbane?”, those tools pull from structured, authoritative web content to generate a response. If your business is not structured to be cited, it will not appear in the answer, regardless of how good your Google rankings are.
AEO is not a replacement for SEO. It is the next layer and right now, most of your competitors have not started building it.
AI models build understanding through named entities. Businesses, people, products, and places with clear, consistent, cross-referenced information.
If your information is inconsistent across your website, Google Business Profile, social profiles, and directories, AI models can't confidently identify and cite you. We audit and align every touchpoint to build a clear, unambiguous entity profile.
Schema markup is machine-readable metadata that tells AI and search engines exactly what your content means, not just what it says.
FAQ, How-To, Organisation, Product, and Review schema all provide the structured context AI models use to extract and cite information. We implement the full schema stack appropriate to your business type and content.
AI tools prioritise content that directly answers specific questions in a clear, structured format:
All written with precise, citable language for the natural-language queries your customers are asking. We audit your existing content and rewrite or supplement it with AEO-structured material.
Our AEO and SEO specialist, Jasper Mitchell, has worked in Answer Engine Optimisation since the discipline emerged, and brought six years of SEO practice to it before that.
That combination matters more than it might sound. AEO sits on an SEO foundation: entity consistency, structured data and authority are search problems before they are AI problems. Someone who has only ever done AEO does not have the grounding to build them properly.
He runs more than twenty active SEO campaigns alongside our AEO work, so the two disciplines are built together rather than bolted onto each other.
Jasper Mitchell
AEO & SEO Specialist
Every AEO engagement begins with a full audit of your current AI visibility: what AI tools say about your business now, what they should be saying, and the gap between the two. From there, we match the scope to what your situation requires.
SEO took years for most businesses to take seriously and the businesses that moved early built compounding advantages that still hold today. AEO is at the same inflection point. The majority of Australian businesses have no AEO infrastructure at all. The question is not whether to build it, it's whether to build it before your competitors do.
AI citation patterns are being established now. The entities that get cited consistently in the next 12 months will be the ones AI models default to recommending for years to come. Moving first isn't just a competitive advantage, in some categories, it may become a structural moat.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the strategic process of structuring a business's digital presence so that AI-powered tools — including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews — can identify the business as an authoritative source and cite it in response to relevant user queries. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking in a list of search results, AEO focuses on becoming the answer that AI tools surface directly.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the practice of improving a website's visibility in traditional search engine results pages, primarily Google. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the practice of structuring content and digital presence to be cited by AI answer engines. The two disciplines overlap significantly — a technically sound, well-structured website with authoritative content is the foundation for both — but AEO requires additional layers: entity consistency, schema markup, and answer-structured content written specifically to be extractable by AI models.
No. AEO complements SEO rather than replacing it. A strong SEO foundation — fast website, clean technical structure, high-quality content, authoritative backlinks — is still the prerequisite for AI citation. AEO builds on that foundation by adding the structured data, entity alignment, and answer-formatted content that AI tools specifically require. We recommend building both simultaneously.
AEO targets the AI tools that consumers and businesses are increasingly using to start their research: ChatGPT (OpenAI), Perplexity AI, Google Gemini, Google's AI Overviews (formerly SGE), Microsoft Copilot, and Claude (Anthropic). Each tool has slightly different citation behaviours, but all favour structured, entity-consistent, authoritative content from credible web sources.
We measure AEO results through AI citation monitoring — tracking how frequently and accurately your business is cited in response to relevant queries across the major AI tools. We also track structured data health, entity consistency scores, and traditional SEO metrics that correlate with AI visibility. Every client receives a monthly AI visibility report as part of their AEO engagement.
Pending — AEO package pricing needs to be confirmed before publishing. This is the last unresolved pricing placeholder on the site, so it should be resolved before launch. The right scope depends on your current digital footprint, the competitiveness of your category, and how aggressively you want to build AI visibility. Book a free AEO consultation and we will give you an accurate recommendation based on your situation.
Technical AEO work — schema implementation, entity alignment, FAQ structured content — can produce measurable improvements in AI citation frequency within 4 to 8 weeks. Building genuine topical authority and consistent AI citation across multiple tools is a longer-term programme, typically 3 to 6 months to see compounding results. Like SEO, it rewards businesses that start early and build consistently.
Yes. Marketing Together offers AEO as a dedicated service, led by our AEO & SEO Specialist, Jasper Mitchell, based on the Gold Coast. He has worked in Answer Engine Optimisation since the discipline emerged, and brought six years of SEO experience to it. We were early movers in this space and have been building AEO infrastructure for Australian businesses since AI search tools began to meaningfully influence consumer behaviour.
Most businesses don't know, which is why we raise it rather than wait to be asked. The quickest test is to ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who the best provider of your service is in your area, and see whether you appear. If you don't, and a competitor does, the gap is already forming. We'll run that check for you as part of a free AEO consultation.
Book a free AEO consultation. We'll run an AI visibility audit on your business, checking how you appear (or don't appear) across the major AI tools and give you a clear picture of what it would take to become the cited answer in your category.
You don't need a brief ready. Working out what to do is the job. We'll be in touch within one business day.
