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AEO and GEO agency

Answer and generativeengine optimizationthat makes AI recommend you.

Your buyers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI who to hire. Right now, it may be naming someone else. We change that with a team of specialists and AI doing the heavy lifting, and SEO as the foundation underneath.

Nothing published without approval
Two calls, second with the delivery team
Any CMS, any stack
AI Assistant

“Who are the best providers in my area?”

Answer

1A competitor, namedCited with source link
2A competitor, namedCited with source link
3A competitor, namedCited with source link
Your businessNot mentioned

Illustrative. Run the query on your own category and count how many times your name comes back.

Deli the Deligatr mascot presenting answer engine optimization results

In short

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making a business the source AI assistants cite when someone asks for a recommendation. Traditional SEO competes for a position on a results page. AEO competes to be named inside the answer itself. It works by structuring content, entity signals and technical markup so large language models can extract, verify and quote a business with confidence. You will also hear it called generative engine optimization (GEO). The two terms describe the same work from two angles: being the answer, and being the source generative models cite.

Test it yourself

Ask AI who the best business in your category is. Count how many times you appear.

You do not have to take our word for anything on this page. Thirty seconds and your own phone will tell you whether you have a problem.

01Open ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI ModeAny of them. Use the one your customers are most likely to reach for.
02Ask the question a customer would askNot your brand name. Ask it the way someone who has never heard of you would. Who are the best commercial roofers in Leeds? Best accounting firm for contractors in Austin?
03Count how many times your name comes backMany businesses reading this will count zero. Note the names that did come back, because those businesses are winning the decision before it ever reaches a search results page.

The businesses that came back are not necessarily better than you. They are more legible to the model. That is a solvable problem, and solving it is the entire job.

Every one of those answers is a buying decision made before anyone visits a website, runs a search, or picks up the phone for a quote. If your name is not in the answer, you were never in the running.

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Deli the Deligatr mascot reviewing local AI search visibility across a city
The mechanism

Why AI recommends one business and ignores another

Answer engines are not picking favorites. They are picking whichever business gives them the clearest, most verifiable, most extractable information. Six signals decide it, and all six are things we can change.

None of them are secrets. They are simply work that almost nobody has done yet in your category, which is exactly why the window is open right now.

See Where You Stand
01Entity
02Structure
03Schema
04Sources
05Freshness
06Access
AI decideswho to cite
Deli the Deligatr mascot working out why AI cites one business over another
01Entity

Entity clarity

The model has to know exactly what you are before it can recommend you. A business described as a services company is invisible. A commercial roofing contractor serving Greater Manchester is citable. Precision is the difference between being retrievable and being noise.

02Structure

Extractable answers

Language models lift clean question and answer structures. Information buried inside flowing prose gets skipped, however well written it is. We restructure content so the answer to each buyer question sits in a block a model can pull whole.

03Schema

Structured data

Schema markup hands a machine a verified fact instead of asking it to infer one. Services, locations, credentials, opening hours, FAQs. Each becomes something the model quotes with confidence rather than a guess it avoids making.

04Sources

Corroboration

Models weigh whether the same claim appears in more than one place. A claim that exists only on your own website is a weak claim. Consistent presence across directories, industry sources and third-party mentions turns positioning into verified fact.

05Freshness

Freshness and maintenance

Answer engines favor information confirmed recently. A page accurate two years ago carries less weight than one confirmed last month. This is why AEO is an ongoing engagement. Visibility decays when nobody maintains it.

06Access

Technical accessibility

If your content renders entirely in the browser, sits behind a gate, or loads slowly enough that crawlers time out, the systems feeding these models never see it. We fix the floor first. There is no point optimizing content a machine cannot reach.

AEO vs SEO

SEO wins you a slot. AEO wins you the recommendation.

They are not rivals and you do not choose between them. The work overlaps heavily, so search performance tends to benefit while we optimize for AI. The difference is what you are competing for.

Traditional search

Ten results, one click

You, maybe

You fight for one of ten positions, then fight again for the click, then fight again to convince someone still comparing you against nine alternatives.

Answer engines

One answer, three names

A handful of names get spoken. If yours is one of them, the trust step is done before anyone has visited your website.

What you compete for

SEO

A position in a list of ten links

AEO

Being named inside the answer given

How many winners

SEO

Ten on page one, plus ads

AEO

A handful, sometimes one

What the buyer sees

SEO

Options they evaluate themselves

AEO

A recommendation already made

Primary levers

SEO

Keywords, links, content depth, speed

AEO

Entity, schema, extractability, corroboration

How trust transfers

SEO

The buyer decides whether to trust you

AEO

The assistant has already vouched for you

The outcome

What answer engine optimization actually changes

Not citations for the sake of citations. The point is what lands in your calendar and your inbox.

Deli the Deligatr mascot with a rising AI visibility chart

Inquiries that arrive pre-sold

Someone handed your name by an AI assistant arrives already recommended. They are not comparing you against nine open tabs. The trust step happened before first contact, which shortens the conversation and raises the close rate on it.

A channel you own, not one you rent

Paid traffic stops the day you stop paying. Visibility inside AI answers compounds. The work commissioned this quarter keeps producing next year, and it gets harder to displace the longer it runs.

Search benefits alongside it

The work that makes you legible to an answer engine overlaps heavily with the work that makes you legible to Google, so your organic search performance tends to benefit alongside it. Results vary by site and market.

More of what actually pays you

Bookings, signups, inquiry forms, phone calls. Visibility that does not convert is overhead, so conversion is designed into the work from the first draft. We optimize the page receiving the visitor, not just the answer sending them.

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How we work

Done for you, and done with you.

Every engagement is scoped to your site, and it starts from the Inbound package at $2,500 a month. It is run like an engagement.

Scoped from scratch, every time

Every business sits in a different market with a different technical starting point and a different set of buyer questions. We scope around yours. We do not drop your logo into a template.

Nothing goes live without approval

Every page, every piece of content, every structural change is reviewed by you before it publishes. No exceptions, and it is not a premium option.

Weekly communication, monthly reporting

You hear from your account manager every week, not when a report is due. Monthly reporting covers AI visibility movement, search performance, what shipped and what comes next.

We watch so you do not have to

Core algorithm updates, new AI surfaces, changes to how assistants source and cite, and the regulation following all of it. We adjust before it costs you visibility.

Built to keep running

The inbound engine does not stop producing when a project closes, because the engagement does not work that way. Visibility decays when nobody maintains it, so maintaining it is the work.

The same people throughout

Your account manager and delivery team stay with your business. You will not re-explain your market to someone new every quarter.

Deli the Deligatr mascot building answer engine optimization into a website

What the work involves

The mix is decided on your first two calls, because a franchise with forty locations and a single-site business need very different things. What follows is the toolkit, not a checklist we run identically for everyone.

  • Original content built around what your buyers actually ask
  • Case studies and proof assets that give AI something concrete to cite
  • Technical and structural work across your site
  • Entity and schema architecture machines can verify
  • A targeted inbound strategy that keeps producing after it is built
  • Conversion work on the pages that receive the visitor
Scope My Engagement
Honest expectations

How long answer engine optimization takes to work

Anyone promising results in week one is selling you something else. Here is the real shape of it, and why we build it this way.

M1M2M3M4M5M6Steady buildOver-optimized

Month 2: first movement in citations

Months 4 to 5: commercial results

Illustrative shape of a typical engagement, not client data. Your curve depends on your starting technical health, your category, and how competitive AI answers already are in your market.

Months 1 to 2

Foundation and first movement

Technical floor fixed, entity and schema architecture built, first content structured and approved. Impressions and early AI citations begin to move around month two, once the work has been crawled and re-indexed.

Months 3 to 4

Coverage and corroboration

Content depth expands across the questions your buyers ask. Third-party corroboration builds. Your name starts appearing in answers where previously only competitors were named.

Months 4 to 5

Commercial results

Inquiries, bookings and calls you can trace back. This is where results should start to show. These are planning estimates, not guarantees, and timing depends on your site, your category and your market.

Why we will not make it faster

We could publish a hundred pages next month and spike your numbers. Sites that climb unnaturally fast fall the same way, and recovering from that costs more than doing it properly the first time. We build steady, defensible growth that looks exactly like what it is: a business doing consistent, credible work on its visibility.

What happens next

Two calls, and you will know exactly where you stand

No proposal that lands three weeks later. No being sold by one team and handed to another.

1You book
2Call one
3Call two
4Work begins

Call one

One of our founders

About 30 minutes

  • We learn your business, your market and what a customer is worth to you
  • We look at where you currently stand in AI answers for your category
  • We confirm whether AEO is the right investment, and say so honestly if it is not
  • You get a clear scope and price before any commitment

Call two

Your account manager and the delivery team

About 45 minutes

  • The people who will do the work, not a different team you meet after signing
  • Visibility findings specific to you and the competitors being named instead
  • Business recommendations, including things outside AEO if we see them
  • The plan for what we tackle first, and why that order
Deli the Deligatr mascot planning an AI visibility engagement on a discovery call

You will not be sold by one team and handed to another. The people on call two are the people doing the work.

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Who this is for

Who we build AI visibility for

The technical foundations are the same. The strategy, the query set and the content are not, which is why every engagement gets scoped from scratch.

Deli the Deligatr mascot marking out local AI search territory

Local businesses

Best service in city is a common recommendation query put to an AI assistant. Being absent from that answer is a costly gap, because the buyer had clear intent and you were never in the conversation.

Deli the Deligatr mascot holding keys for multi-location franchise visibility

Franchises

Every location is a separate answer to a separate question. Multi-location visibility built at scale, so a buyer in one city gets the same coherent story as a buyer in another and the brand does not fragment.

Deli the Deligatr mascot running ecommerce product visibility work

Ecommerce

AI shopping queries are product led, so the levers differ: product markup, review depth and recency, comparison content, feed hygiene, product data specificity. We scope this honestly rather than selling a service page strategy that will not move product.

Deli the Deligatr mascot automating visibility for established firms in every industry

Industry specialists

Law firms, insurers, accountants, advisors, consultants, agencies, recruiters, real estate, construction, IT, manufacturers and SaaS. Each has its own buyer questions, its own sources and its own approach, backed by an audit of real firms in that industry.

Deli the Deligatr mascot representing a white label AEO delivery team

Agencies, white label

Deliver answer engine optimization to your clients under your own brand. Our team, your logo, your margins, your client relationship. Reporting you can rebrand and hand over without editing.

Our research

We run our own AEO tool on real businesses, and publish what it finds

217 established businesses across 12 industries, 1,085 live buyer queries, every audit published in full with its limits. The same tool powers your free audit.

Where we draw the line

Who we turn down

Gambling, casinos and 18+

Not a fit for how we work, and not a market we build in. We would rather tell you that on the first call than take the engagement and under-serve it.

Medical, legal and financial advice

We work with clinics, law firms and advisors on how they are found and described, but we never write or imply advice. Google holds that content to an evidence standard requiring genuine, verifiable professional credentials, and an agency cannot manufacture those signals. Advice stays with your qualified professionals.

Saying no to the wrong work is how we protect the results of the right work.

It does not matter what your website is built on

Answer engine optimization is about the signals your site emits, not the software emitting them. We work across the full range of platforms, and where a platform genuinely limits what is possible we tell you before you commit rather than after.

WordPressShopifyWooCommerceWebflowWixSquarespaceHubSpotBigCommerceDrupalFramerNext.jsCustom builds
The bigger picture

Demand you capture, and demand you create

Answer engine optimization wins the buyers already looking. It does nothing for the buyers who would hire you but have not started looking. Two different problems, two different machines.

Inbound

Demand that exists

Someone in your market is asking an AI assistant who to hire, today. Answer engine optimization makes sure the answer includes you.

Outbound

Demand that does not exist yet

The buyer who would say yes but has not started searching. Reaching them is a different job, and it is the other half of what we do through managed outbound.

Running both is how a business stops depending on whichever channel happens to be working that quarter. You do not have to start with both. Inbound and Outbound are the same price and a choice of direction, and Hybrid is both. Full detail is on our pricing page.

Talk Through Both on a Call
Deli the Deligatr mascot showing the full funnel of inbound and outbound demand
Questions

Answer engine optimization, answered

The questions we get asked on nearly every first call.

What is answer engine optimization?

Answer engine optimization is the practice of making a business the source that AI assistants cite when someone asks them for a recommendation. When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode or Copilot who the best provider in a category is, the assistant returns a small number of named businesses. AEO is the work that gets your business into that answer. It covers entity clarity, so the model knows precisely what you are, structured data, so it can verify facts rather than guess them, content structured for extraction, so it can lift a clean answer, and corroboration across third-party sources, so your claims are confirmed somewhere other than your own website.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

In practice they describe the same work. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is framed from the buyer side: becoming the answer an assistant gives when someone asks for a recommendation. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is framed from the machine side: becoming a source that generative models retrieve and cite. Both come down to the same levers, a clear entity, structured and extractable content, technical access, and corroboration from sources the models trust. We treat them as one discipline, with SEO as the foundation underneath it.

What do answer engine optimization services and generative engine optimization services include?

Both names describe one body of work, and the same applies to AI SEO and LLM SEO services. As an AEO and GEO agency we audit how AI assistants currently describe your business, fix the technical and structural gaps that stop them citing you, rewrite the pages and profiles they draw on, and build the third-party presence they trust. We measure the result by tracking where you are named, not by rankings alone. SEO stays in the program as the foundation. If you want to see where you stand first, run the free AI visibility audit.

How is AEO different from SEO?

AEO and SEO compete for different things. SEO competes for a position in a list of ten links, where the buyer still evaluates the options themselves. AEO competes to be named inside the single answer the assistant gives, where the recommendation has already been made on your behalf. The practical difference is the number of winners: page one has ten slots plus ads, whereas an AI answer usually names only a handful of businesses, sometimes one. The underlying work overlaps heavily, because technical health, content quality and genuine authority matter to both, so organic search performance tends to benefit while we are optimizing for AI. Results vary by site and market.

How long does answer engine optimization take to work?

Answer engine optimization does not produce results in week one, and anyone promising that is selling you something else. Expect early movement in impressions and AI citations from around month two, once the structural and technical work is in place and has been re-crawled. Meaningful commercial results, meaning inquiries and bookings you can trace back to the work, usually take several months to arrive, and the timing depends on your site, your category and how competitive AI answers already are in your market. We build steady, defensible growth rather than a spike. Sites that climb unnaturally fast fall the same way, and recovering from that costs considerably more than doing it properly the first time.

Do I still need SEO if I invest in AEO?

You get both. The foundations of answer engine optimization are the same foundations good SEO rests on: a technically healthy site, clean information architecture, content that genuinely answers what people ask, structured data, and authority earned rather than bought. We do that work in order to win AI citations, and your organic search rankings improve as a consequence. That is the honest framing. We are not selling you AEO and quietly doing SEO, and we are not selling you SEO with an AI label on it. We optimize for the answer, and the ranking follows because the same signals drive both.

How do you get a business cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity?

Getting cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity comes down to being the easiest business for a model to describe accurately and confidently. That means defining your entity precisely, so the model knows exactly what category you belong to and where you operate. It means structuring content so answers can be extracted whole rather than inferred from prose. It means marking up verifiable facts in schema so the model quotes data rather than guessing. It means building corroboration, because a claim appearing only on your own site carries less weight than one confirmed across independent sources. And it means maintaining all of it, because answer engines favor information they have confirmed recently.

How do you measure AI visibility?

AI visibility is measured by tracking how often your business is mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers across the queries that matter to your market, and how that compares with your named competitors. We track mention volume, citation volume, share of voice against competitors, and which of your pages are being used as sources. Alongside that we track AI referral traffic as a distinct channel, separating visitors arriving from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot from ordinary organic search. Many businesses are not tracking that split at all, which is why they cannot tell whether AI is sending them anything.

Will this work on my platform?

Answer engine optimization works on any platform, because it depends on the signals your website emits rather than the software emitting them. We work across WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, HubSpot, Next.js, Magento, BigCommerce, Drupal and fully custom builds. Some platforms make certain work faster than others, and a small number impose genuine limits on what can be implemented. Where that applies to you, we say so on the first call rather than after you have committed. If a platform limitation is going to cap your results, you should know before you spend anything.

How much does answer engine optimization cost?

Answer engine optimization is delivered through our Inbound program, which pairs an AEO, GEO and SEO program with DeliChat identification and scoring. Inbound is $2,500 a month on monthly billing with no long-term commitment, $6,000 a quarter or $18,000 a year when paid up front. Our Full Hybrid package, which adds managed Outbound, is $5,000 a month. Full detail is on our pricing page. On the first call we confirm the program fits your site, your category and your locations, before any commitment, and we will tell you plainly if the investment does not make commercial sense.

What happens on the two calls?

The first call is with one of our founders and runs about thirty minutes. We learn your business, your market and what a customer is worth to you, we look at where you currently stand in AI answers for your category, and we confirm whether this is the right investment. You leave that call with a clear scope and price. The second call is with your account manager and the delivery team, and runs about forty-five minutes. They bring visibility findings specific to your business, the competitors currently being named instead of you, business recommendations including anything we spot outside AEO, and the plan for what we tackle first. The people on the second call are the people who do the work.

Do you publish anything without my approval?

No. Every page, every piece of content and every structural change is reviewed and approved by you before it goes live. There are no exceptions and it is not a premium option. You are the expert on your business, your market and your customers, and the work is measurably better when that knowledge is in the room rather than being guessed at. This is what we mean by done for you and done with you at the same time. We handle strategy, technical execution and production. You keep final say over everything carrying your name.

Which industries do you not work with?

We do not work with gambling, casinos or 18+ businesses. We do work with firms in health, legal and financial sectors, such as clinics, law firms and advisors, on how they are found and described, but we never write or imply medical, legal or financial advice. Google classifies medical, financial and legal topics as Your Money or Your Life and holds that content to an evidence standard requiring genuine, verifiable professional credentials attached to the content itself. An agency cannot manufacture those signals, and any agency claiming it can is selling you a risk rather than a result. Advice content stays with your qualified professionals, and we will tell you on the first call where that line sits.

Can you deliver AEO under my agency brand?

Yes. We deliver white label answer engine optimization for agencies who want to offer AI visibility to their clients without building the capability in house. Our team does the work, your brand fronts it, and you own the client relationship and the margin. Reporting is produced so you can rebrand and forward it without editing. This suits agencies who already hold the client trust and the retainer but do not have an AEO specialist on the team, and it scales without hiring for a discipline that is still changing month to month.

Still have a question we have not answered here?

Ask Us on a Call

Find out what AI says about your business.

Thirty minutes. We look at where you currently stand in AI answers, what your competitors are being cited for, and whether answer engine optimization is worth the investment for your business. If it is not, we will say so.

  • A clear scope and price before any commitment
  • Second call with the team who will do the work
  • No proposal that arrives three weeks later
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Deli the Deligatr mascot celebrating a top AI visibility position

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