Answer Engine Optimisation
When AI answers a question about your market, are you the one it cites?
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making your content easy for AI models to understand, trust, and cite. Surfaceable tracks your AI citation rate across four platforms and tells you exactly what to fix to get mentioned more.
Track your AI citations freeWhat is AEO?
The discipline that replaces keyword ranking for the AI era.
For twenty-five years, SEO meant getting to the top of Google's blue links. That still matters. But a growing share of buyer journeys now start with a question to an AI assistant — and the brand that gets cited in that answer wins the click, the trust, and often the sale.
Answer Engine Optimisation is the set of content, technical, and authority-building practices that make your brand more likely to appear in AI-generated responses. It overlaps with SEO in many places — but it adds new signals like structured data density, topical authority breadth, and AI crawler accessibility.
AEO vs SEO
How Surfaceable helps
Track, measure, and improve your AI citation rate.
Prompt tracking
Build a library of prompts that mirror real buyer intent — the questions your customers ask AI assistants when they're in the market for what you offer. Surfaceable runs them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini and records every response.
Brand mention analysis
After each run, Surfaceable scans every AI response for brand mentions. It detects your brand, your competitors, and any other entities you're tracking — then calculates your presence rate, position, and share of voice for that prompt set.
Trend tracking over time
AEO is a long game. As you publish more cite-worthy content and improve your structured data, your AI mention rate should rise. Surfaceable charts your visibility score trend so you can correlate content changes with improvements in AI citations.
AI readiness audit
Surfaceable's SEO audit includes a dedicated AI Readiness check. It surfaces specific on-page changes — FAQ schema, clear headers, an llms.txt file, factual density — that make your content more likely to be cited by AI models.
Prompt gap analysis
Identify queries where competitors get cited and you don't. If a rival consistently appears when someone asks about a topic adjacent to your product, that's a content gap you can close — and Surfaceable makes it visible.
Content recommendations
Based on your prompt results, Surfaceable highlights the types of pages, formats, and topics that tend to get cited. Structured comparison pages, authoritative how-to guides, and FAQ-rich content all consistently outperform thin marketing copy.
The fundamentals
Four principles that drive AI citations.
01
Be factually dense
AI models are trained to cite sources that provide clear, verifiable, specific information. Vague marketing copy rarely gets cited. Pages that directly answer questions with precise, accurate claims — including numbers, dates, and named specifics — are far more likely to appear in AI responses.
02
Structure for extraction
AI models break content into extractable chunks. Pages with clear H2/H3 hierarchy, bullet lists, and short paragraphs give models natural extraction points. FAQ schema in particular is a direct signal — it tells the model that your page was written to answer questions.
03
Build topical authority
A site that comprehensively covers a topic — through multiple related pages, internal linking, and consistent publishing — is more likely to be seen as authoritative by AI models. Being the most thorough source on your topic matters more than being optimised for a single keyword.
04
Be accessible to AI crawlers
Some sites inadvertently block AI crawlers in their robots.txt. Others have JavaScript-heavy pages that don't render cleanly for bots. Surfaceable's audit checks that the major AI crawlers can access and read your content without barriers.
Who this is for
AEO matters most in competitive, research-driven markets.
If your buyers research before buying — comparing tools, reading reviews, asking "what's the best X for Y?" — then AI assistants are already part of their consideration process. The brands that appear in those answers have a measurable advantage over those that don't.
SaaS companies, professional service firms, e-commerce brands with considered purchases, and B2B vendors all benefit immediately from understanding and improving their AI citation rate.
Know your current AI citation rate across four major platforms
Identify the exact prompts where competitors outrank you
Get a prioritised list of content changes to improve citations
Track how model updates affect your brand's visibility
Measure the ROI of your content and AEO investments over time
Combine AEO data with traditional SEO metrics in one dashboard