Answer engine optimisation agency for brands that want to be the answer
AEO is the work of making one passage on your site the most liftable answer to a question your buyers already ask.
One sentence, written once, standing in three places
An answer surface does not summarise your page. It takes a passage off it, so the passage is the whole job.
- 01
The page
The question becomes the heading, and the sentence directly under it settles it on its own. Everything else on the page sits below that line, because a surface lifts the passage away from the page and it has to stand up without it.
- 02
The markup
FAQPage markup repeats the words a visitor can see, never a tidier second version written for the crawler. Markup that drifts from the visible answer earns less than none at all.
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Nobody wins an answer box by writing more. You win it by writing one sentence that survives being lifted off your page, then saying the same thing in the markup.
The work between a buyer's question and your line
Answer surfaces reward structure, so most of this is shape rather than word count.
- 01
The questions, taken from the box
We read the wording out of People Also Ask, related searches and your own site search, so the heading matches how buyers actually phrase it.
- 02
The answer before the argument
The question becomes the heading and the line under it settles it in one sentence, with the depth below rather than above.
- 03
The shape the surface returns
Some questions come back as a paragraph, some as a list, some as a table. We write in the shape the box returns today.
- 04
Markup that says what the page says
FAQPage, QAPage and HowTo marking the words already on the page, kept in step as the copy moves.
- 05
Answers on the pages that sell
Wherever it can honestly sit there, the answer goes on the category or product page rather than a blog archive.
- 06
A ledger of boxes held and lost
Each tracked question, who holds it this month and what changed. Answer surfaces move constantly, so the report is a running ledger.
Retention programmes, written up in full
FAQs
What is answer engine optimisation?
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of structuring a page so an answer surface can lift one passage from it and show that passage as the answer. The surfaces are featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice replies and the answer block that sits above the results. The unit of work is a question and the sentence that settles it, not a page and a position.
How is AEO different from GEO?
AEO is about extraction and GEO is about synthesis. An answer surface lifts your sentence more or less whole, so the levers are shape: the heading, the liftable line, the format and the markup behind it. A generative engine reads several sources and writes its own sentence instead, so the levers there are entity strength, corroboration across independent sources and crawler access. Same ambition, different mechanics, which is why generative engine optimisation gets its own page on this site rather than a paragraph on this one.
Is AEO just SEO under a new name?
Partly, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Google's public line is that optimising for its AI features is still search optimisation, and the crawling, indexing and quality foundations are shared. What is genuinely different is the unit of competition: organic search competes for a position in a list, AEO competes for a single extracted passage, and a page can hold one without holding the other.
Which surfaces count as answer engines?
Featured snippets and People Also Ask on a results page, the AI Overview block above them, voice assistant replies, and the short answer an assistant gives before it lists its sources. They render differently and they are built differently, but they all do the same thing to your page: pick one passage and repeat it.
If the box answers the question, do we lose the click?
Sometimes, which is why the question you pick matters more than the technique. A pure definition often ends in the box with no visit, so we do not chase those on their own. The questions worth holding are the ones a step before a purchase, where answering names a size, a fit or a product type, and the source line under the answer is the click.
Which schema types actually matter here?
FAQPage, QAPage and HowTo carry question and answer pairs, and Product with Offer keeps the commercial facts unambiguous. What matters more than the type is the match. The markup has to repeat words a visitor can see on the page, because marked up text that appears nowhere on screen is the quickest way to have all of it ignored.
How do you measure it, and how fast does it move?
A fixed question set, checked on the same schedule, recording which questions return your passage, which return somebody else's and what the surface actually says. Search Console carries the impressions and clicks underneath that. It moves faster than a ranking and it is far less stable, so the report is a ledger of boxes held and lost rather than one before and after. No engine publishes a share of answers, so we never quote one.
Can you guarantee a featured snippet?
No, and anyone offering to is selling something else. Nobody controls what gets extracted, and the surfaces change the rules without telling anybody. What we commit to is the work: the questions agreed with you, the pages restructured around them, the markup matched to the copy, and a monthly ledger showing which boxes moved and which did not.
Want to know which questions you could hold?
Send over the questions your buyers ask you on the phone. We will check what each one returns today and tell you which of them your pages could plausibly answer better than whoever holds the box now.
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