A growing share of buyers now start with a question to an AI assistant — "best marketing agency for a skincare launch in India", "what CRM should a clinic use" — instead of a search box. If the assistant doesn't know your brand, you're not in the conversation.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is how you fix that. It isn't a trick; it's making your brand easy for AI systems to find, understand and cite correctly.
How AI assistants find brands
Broadly, assistants answer from two sources:
- What they learned in training — a snapshot of the public web, which can be months or years old.
- Live web search — many assistants now search the web when answering, using search indexes (for example, ChatGPT search draws on Bing among other sources, and Gemini on Google).
So AEO has two jobs: be well described across the public web, and be easy to retrieve and quote when an assistant searches.
The practical checklist
1. Let the AI crawlers in
Check that your site doesn't block AI crawlers such as GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended — both in your robots.txt file and in any bot-blocking settings at your hosting or CDN provider. Many sites block them without realising.
2. Be indexed in both Google and Bing
Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing matters more than people think, because several AI assistants use it for live search. IndexNow lets you notify Bing the moment a page changes.
3. State the facts about your brand clearly — once, and consistently
Every assistant is trying to answer "who is this company, what do they do, where, for whom?". Make that easy:
- A clear "about" paragraph on your homepage and About page.
- The same name, description, location and contact details everywhere — website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories.
- Mismatched or vague descriptions make assistants hedge or get it wrong.
4. Add structured data
Schema markup (JSON-LD) tells machines what your page is about: Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList. It removes guesswork about your services, location and contact details.
5. Publish an llms.txt file
llms.txt is an emerging convention: a plain-language summary of your site, placed at your domain root, written for AI systems. It points them to your most important pages and facts. It's quick to add and costs nothing.
6. Write answers, not just pages
Assistants quote content that answers a question directly.
- Use questions people actually ask as headings.
- Answer in the first sentence or two, then add detail.
- Add FAQ sections with short, factual answers.
- Prefer specific, checkable statements over marketing language.
7. Be mentioned elsewhere
Assistants trust brands that other sources talk about: directories (Clutch, GoodFirms, Crunchbase), industry publications, partner pages, podcasts, reviews and social profiles. Consistent third-party mentions do a lot of work.
8. Keep it fresh
Update key pages when your services, prices or locations change. Outdated facts get repeated by assistants for a long time.
How to check where you stand
Ask several assistants the questions your buyers ask — and also "What is [your brand]?" — and note whether you appear, whether the description is accurate, and which sources they cite. Repeat monthly.
We set all of this up on our own site — crawler access, sitemaps for Google and Bing, structured data, llms.txt and FAQ content. If you want the same for your brand, see our SEO & AEO service.