AEO Services: What an Answer Engine Optimisation Agency Should Actually Do

AEO services help a business get cited accurately by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. A credible service covers five things: mapping the questions buyers ask, fixing crawl and index access, rewriting content into citable claims, making business facts consistent across the web, and monitoring what assistants say. No credible service guarantees citations.

That last sentence is the one to remember when you're comparing agencies. Answer engine optimisation is new enough that the market is full of confident promises, and some of what's being sold doesn't do anything. This piece sets out what AEO services should include, what they can't do, and the red flags that tell you an agency is selling something else.

If you need the basics first, start with what answer engine optimisation is.

What should AEO services include?

AEO services should include five pieces of work, in roughly this order. Skip any one of them and the rest underperforms.

1. A question map

Every AEO engagement should start with the questions your buyers actually ask, in their words. Not a keyword list. A keyword list tells you what people type into Google. A question map tells you what they ask an assistant before they shortlist a supplier: "Which agencies in Vancouver do brand strategy for B2B?", "How much does brand strategy cost for a small business?", "How is AEO different from SEO?"

The output is a ranked list of questions, each with the page on your site that should be the best answer to it. If no page exists, that's a content gap.

2. Crawl and index access

AI assistants can't cite pages their crawlers can't reach. An AEO service should check that your robots.txt allows the crawlers that feed AI search, including Googlebot, OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, and that your important pages are actually indexed.

This is quick work, and it's the most common silent failure. Sites regularly block AI crawlers by accident, through a security plugin, a firewall rule or a robots.txt copied from somewhere else.

3. Content rewritten into citable claims

This is the core of AEO services, and it's where most of the time should go. Pages get restructured so that:

• each one opens with a short, direct answer to its main question
• headings are phrased as the questions buyers ask
• each sentence makes one claim and names who's making it
• every statistic has a named, linked source

The test is whether a single sentence, lifted off the page, answers part of a question completely and still says who said it. Most service pages fail that test. They're written to sound good, not to be quoted.

4. Entity and schema work

AI assistants build a picture of your business from every source they can find. AEO services should make that picture consistent: the same name, address, contact details and description on your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories, with the founder or key people clearly connected to the business.

Structured data (schema.org markup) then makes those facts machine-readable. Organization, Article, BreadcrumbList and FAQPage are the usual starting set. Google's guidance is that markup must match what's visible on the page, so schema is a way of labelling the truth, not a way of adding claims.

5. Monitoring and reporting

You can't manage what assistants say about you without checking. A real AEO service runs your question map through the main assistants on a schedule, records whether you're mentioned, linked and described accurately, and reports the trend. It should also track referral visits from AI assistants in your analytics.

Ask to see a sample report before you sign. If it's a list of keyword rankings with "AI" in the title, it isn't AEO reporting.

What can't AEO services do?

AEO services can't guarantee citations, rankings in AI answers or a fixed share of AI traffic. No agency controls the output of ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI features. The systems change often, and answers vary between sessions even for the same question.

AEO services also can't make generic content distinctive. If your positioning is interchangeable with your competitors', AEO makes the sameness easier for machines to read. An assistant has no reason to cite you over ten other pages saying the same thing. That's why Alchelyst treats a clear brand position as part of AEO rather than a separate project: you can only be cited for a claim you've actually made.

What are the red flags when hiring an AEO agency?

These are the warning signs that an AEO agency is selling something other than answer engine optimisation:

• Guaranteed citations or placements. Nobody can guarantee what an AI assistant says. A guarantee means the agency either doesn't understand the systems or is counting on you not checking.
• A secret "AI schema" or special markup. Google says plainly that there's no special schema.org structured data needed to appear in its AI features, and no special AI text files (Google Search Central). Standard schema helps; secret schema is a story.
• llms.txt as the headline deliverable. An llms.txt file takes minutes to write. It can't be the main thing you're paying for.
• Volume as the strategy. "Fifty AI-optimised articles a month" usually means fifty pages of category-average content. Answer engines already produce category-average content on their own. They don't need to cite yours.
• No question list. If the agency can't tell you which buyer questions it's targeting, it can't tell you whether it's working.
• No mention of SEO fundamentals. AEO sits on top of crawlability, indexing and site quality. An agency that skips those is skipping the part that decides whether anything else matters.

How is an AEO service different from an SEO service?

An AEO service is an SEO service with a different unit of success. SEO measures whether pages rank and get clicked. AEO measures whether specific sentences get cited and whether AI assistants describe the business accurately.

In practice the work overlaps heavily, so don't buy them separately. AEO without SEO is missing the foundation.

What does Alchelyst's AEO service include?

Alchelyst's SEO / AEO service works backwards from the questions your buyers type into search and ask AI assistants, then makes your site the most defensible answer to them. It ships:

• intent mapping, built from your buyers' real questions
• technical and on-page fixes, including crawler access, indexing, canonicals and site structure
• content architecture, so every important question has one clear page that answers it
• entity and schema work, so your business is described the same way everywhere
• citable claim structuring, rewriting pages so their key sentences can be quoted and attributed
• monitoring how AI assistants describe you, reported monthly

What makes it different is the order. Alchelyst starts with what your business actually believes and can defend, through the Core, because a claim has to exist before it can be cited. Then the SEO and AEO work makes that claim the clearest answer on the web.

If you want to see where you stand, book a strategy call. Alchelyst will ask a few of your buyers' questions in ChatGPT and Perplexity on the call, show you what comes back, and tell you plainly what it would fix first.

Frequently asked questions

What do AEO services include?

AEO services should include a map of the questions buyers ask, crawl and index checks for AI search crawlers, content rewritten into short and attributable claims, consistent business facts and schema markup across the web, and regular monitoring of what AI assistants say about the business.

Can an AEO agency guarantee my business appears in ChatGPT?

No. No agency controls what ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI features say, and answers vary between sessions. A credible AEO agency improves the likelihood and accuracy of citations and measures the trend, but it won't guarantee placement.

Do I need AEO services if I already do SEO?

Possibly not as a separate service. AEO builds on SEO, so a good SEO provider should already be checking AI crawler access, structuring content as direct answers and monitoring AI answers. If yours isn't doing those things, you need them added, whoever does the work.

How long before AEO services show results?

Technical fixes such as unblocking AI crawlers can take effect within days. Content and entity changes usually take months, because AI systems need to re-crawl your pages and other sources need to be updated. Track the same buyer questions monthly to see the trend.