AI search optimisation
Your customers increasingly ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling a results page. AntCrow engineers websites to be found, understood, and cited by those systems: ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude. It is a distinct discipline from classic SEO, and most websites are currently invisible to it.
What is AEO (answer engine optimisation)?
AEO, sometimes called GEO or generative engine optimisation, is the practice of making a website's content likely to be retrieved and cited by AI systems when they generate an answer. Where traditional SEO competes for a position in a ranked list, AEO competes to be the source quoted inside a synthesised response. In practice it emphasises self-contained direct answers, clear factual statements, structured data, unambiguous identity signals about the organisation, and allowing the relevant AI crawlers to access the site at all.
The shift is in how the question gets asked
Classic search returns ten links and lets the visitor choose. An AI assistant returns one composed answer, usually citing a handful of sources. That compresses the field dramatically: being the eighth-best result used to mean some traffic, and now it frequently means none. The compensation is that a citation carries the assistant's implicit endorsement, which is why AI-referred visitors tend to arrive further along in their decision than search visitors do.
Being quotable is a structural property, not a writing style
AI systems retrieve passages, not pages. A paragraph that depends on the three paragraphs above it to make sense is hard to quote safely, so it tends not to be. We restructure content so each substantive answer stands alone: the question phrased the way people ask it, the answer immediately beneath it, specifics rather than adjectives, and no dependence on surrounding context. This also happens to make pages easier for humans to read, which is not a coincidence.
Entity clarity, or making sure the machine knows who you are
Before an assistant can recommend you, it needs to have formed a confident understanding of what your organisation is, what it does, and where it operates. That understanding is assembled from structured data on your site, consistent descriptions of you across the web, and references from sources the system already trusts. Vagueness is the enemy: a business described three different ways in three places is a business the model is unsure about, and models avoid citing what they are unsure about.
Crawler access, which is where many sites silently fail
AI systems use distinct crawlers, and blocking them is easy to do by accident. A robots.txt written years ago, a security product filtering unfamiliar user agents, or a platform default can all make a site invisible to AI retrieval while leaving Google unaffected. We audit which AI crawlers can actually reach your content and make deliberate decisions about each, including the genuinely reasonable decision to block training crawlers while allowing the search and retrieval ones.
- AI visibility baseline across the major assistants
- Entity and identity structured data
- Answer-first content restructuring
- AI crawler access audit and configuration
- llms.txt and machine-readable content surfaces
- Competitor comparison in AI answers
- Prioritised fix list with expected impact
- Re-measurement after implementation
- Your customers research before they buy
- You rank reasonably on Google but never appear in AI answers
- You operate somewhere competitors are already being recommended
- You would rather move early than catch up
AI Search Optimisation: questions, answered
SEO optimises for position in a ranked list of links. AEO, answer engine optimisation, optimises for being cited inside an AI-generated answer. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is a near-synonym of AEO that came out of academic research and is used interchangeably in practice. All three rest on the same foundation of crawlable, credible, well-structured content, but AEO and GEO put more weight on self-contained answers and clear entity signals.
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