More searches now end with an answer instead of a click. If AI assistants cannot identify your business or quote your pages, you are invisible in that answer no matter where you rank.
Organization schema, sameAs profiles and consistent naming, so your business resolves to one entity.
Questions as headings with direct answers underneath, in the shape assistants quote from.
Structured data that makes your answers machine readable rather than merely readable.
Author signals, citations and consistency, which is what these systems weigh when choosing a source.
Making sure AI crawlers are allowed and can render your pages, which many sites block by accident.
Checking how assistants describe your business now, and whether they name you at all.
Nobody can promise a position inside an AI answer the way rankings can be tracked. What can be done is measurable: making your business a clearly defined entity, making your answers quotable, and making sure the crawlers can reach them. Those same changes improve classic rankings anyway, so the work is not wasted either way.
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of making your pages quotable by AI assistants rather than only rankable by search engines. It covers being crawlable, being identifiable as a real business entity, and formatting answers so a machine can lift them cleanly.
The same discipline under a different name. Generative search means the engine writes an answer instead of listing links, and your job is to be the source it uses.
Australian businesses face an extra hurdle: assistants default to larger international sources unless local entity signals are strong.
Classic SEO wins a position. AEO wins a citation. The technical foundations overlap almost entirely, which is why the work is not wasted either way.
No agency can guarantee a position inside an AI answer. What can be measured is whether assistants can find you, identify you and quote you at all.
Often not, and most Australian business owners have never checked. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini to recommend a business like yours in your suburb and see whether your name appears. If it does not, the usual causes are weak entity data, blocked AI crawlers, or content that answers nothing directly.
Some sites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot without realising it. If those are disallowed, you cannot be cited at all.
Organization schema, consistent naming and sameAs links to your real profiles. Assistants need confidence that you are one identifiable business.
Perplexity cites sources visibly, which makes it the easiest assistant to test against. Search your service and suburb and look at which sites it quotes.
Assistants lift the sentence directly under a heading. A heading phrased as a question with a direct answer under it is far more quotable than a paragraph.
No invented testimonials anywhere on this site. Where results were not verified, we say so on the page.
Two months of local SEO for an Australian local business, measured year on year.
Read the case study →Crawl errors cleared from 58,614 to 36 in a full technical rebuild.
Read the case study →Position 2 for a commercial term at 3,700 searches a month.
Read the case study →