SEO, GEO & AEO Optimisation
SEO, GEO and AEO Optimisation: Be Found Wherever Your Audience Is Searching
Rank in traditional search, get cited by AI assistants, and stay visible as the rules of digital discovery keep changing.
SEO has been evolving for over two decades. First it was metadata and keywords. Then context and intent. Now we're in a genuinely different era, and most businesses haven't caught up with what that means for how they get found.
Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity are changing how people search. Instead of a list of links, they get a direct answer, pulled together from across the internet, with references to the sources the AI trusts. Ranking isn't enough any more. You need to be the source that gets cited.
That's a big shift. Your content can now be read by an AI agent and served to someone who never visits your site. That's great if you're the trusted source being referenced. It's a real problem if your competitor is and you're not. We've written a lot about this, tested it in practice, and helped organisations adapt their content and technical foundations to stay visible.
How we help
What we work on
Traditional SEO: getting the foundations right
Before anything else, the technical foundations have to be solid. Crawlability, site structure, page speed, schema markup, internal linking. None of it is glamorous, but all of it matters. AI indexers and traditional search bots both rely on a well-structured site to understand what your content is about and whether it's worth surfacing.
We audit your SEO baseline, find the gaps that are costing you visibility, and fix them in a way that supports everything built on top. This isn't about gaming algorithms. It's about making your content as easy as possible for both humans and bots to understand and trust.
GEO: optimising for generative AI search
Generative Engine Optimisation is about making your content the answer AI models reach for when someone asks a relevant question. That takes a different approach to how you write, structure and position it.
AI models aren't just scanning for keywords. They're weighing trustworthiness, expertise and depth. They compare your answer against everything else on the internet on that topic, and they favour sources with clear, recognised authority and genuinely useful detail. Writing well matters more than indexing cleverly. We help you build that quality and structure systematically, as an ongoing practice rather than a one-off, because freshness and consistency are part of how AI models judge credibility.
AEO: being cited in AI-generated answers
Answer Engine Optimisation is about getting your brand named in the answers AI assistants generate. This is where brand mentions in AI responses, citation frequency across LLMs, and share of voice in generated summaries become the metrics that matter, alongside and increasingly instead of traditional keyword rankings.
We track how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers, find the content and credibility gaps keeping you out of the citations, and help you close them. It's a new discipline and the measurement tools are still maturing, but the businesses building authority now will be much harder to shift in 12 months.
Content strategy built for both humans and bots
One of the biggest things we've learned in this space is that the split between "writing for humans" and "writing for bots" is a false one, and chasing it takes you in the wrong direction. The best content is written for humans, structured for bots, and kept fresh for both.
AI indexers look for content that's current, accurate, well-organised and consistent with what trusted sources elsewhere are saying. So content can't just be published and left. It has to evolve. We help you build a strategy that treats your pages as living assets, reviewed, updated and refined regularly, rather than static documents that quietly go out of date.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Traditional SEO is about ranking in search results like Google and Bing, based on technical quality, relevance and authority signals. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is about making your content structured and credible enough to be used as a source when AI models generate answers. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the more specific job of being cited by name in those answers, so your brand is mentioned, not just listed. All three matter, and they're increasingly connected. Good GEO and AEO still rest on solid SEO foundations.
Yes, and it will for a long time. Traditional search isn't going away, and the technical foundations that make your site readable and trustworthy to Google also make it more credible to AI models. There's a bigger point too: many AI models are trained on, and keep referencing, web content, so ranking well in traditional search is part of how you build the authority that gets you cited in AI answers. The two are complementary, not competing.
This is one of the genuinely hard questions in this space right now, and we'll be honest that the tools are still catching up with the reality. We track brand mentions and citation frequency across the major AI platforms, share of voice in AI-generated answers for relevant queries, and shifts in referral traffic that can point to AI-driven discovery. We use tools like SEMrush alongside AI-specific visibility trackers to build as complete a picture as we can. You won't get a single vanity metric from us. You'll get an honest view of where you're being found and where you're not.
Technical SEO fixes (crawl issues, schema, site structure) can land relatively quickly, sometimes within weeks. GEO and AEO authority building is a longer game. AI models take time to recalibrate as your content improves and your credibility signals strengthen, so it's usually a minimum of 3 months before you see meaningful shifts in citation frequency and AI visibility. The earlier you start, the harder you are to displace. And remember, this is about consistency and about putting new process and governance in place. A one-off push with no process behind it won't hold.
Our view is clear: write first, then use AI to validate, refine and optimise. The worst thing you can do for your GEO and AEO visibility is flood your site with AI-generated content that reads like every other AI page on the internet. AI models are getting good at spotting thin, derivative content, and they don't cite it. What gets cited is real expertise, an original point of view, and content that adds something rather than just summarising what already exists. Use AI as a tool in the process, not a replacement for the thinking.
Let's start the conversation
Search is changing faster than most content strategies are keeping up with. If you want to know where you stand, in traditional search, in AI-generated answers, and in the gap between the two, get in touch. We'll give you an honest picture and a clear sense of what it would take to improve it.
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