Answer engine optimisation (AEO): a guide for Australian small businesses
GroundReach
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is making your business easy for AI-powered answer engines to find, trust and quote. “Answer engines” here means AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, and Google’s AI Overviews, the AI summary that now appears above many Google results.
For a small business, AEO matters for a simple reason: more buyers ask an assistant for a recommendation before they visit any website. If the answer names your competitors and not you, you may never get the click.
Is AEO real, or just SEO with a new name?
Both, in a way. AEO builds on SEO: answer engines with web search find pages much like a search engine does, so the basics (a crawlable site, clear pages, good content) still matter. What changes is what you’re aiming for and how you measure it:
| SEO | AEO / GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank pages in search results | Be named or quoted in AI-written answers |
| What helps most | Relevant pages, links, technical health | Direct answers, clear entity information, mentions on trusted sites |
| How you measure it | Rankings, clicks, traffic | How often assistants name you, and which sources they cite |
GEO (generative engine optimisation) is another name for much the same idea; you’ll see both terms used.
How answer engines choose what to quote
When an assistant has web search on, it searches, reads a set of pages, and writes an answer from what they agree on, often listing the sources. Google’s AI Overviews work similarly, drawing on pages from Google’s index. Two consequences:
- Your page has to be easy to extract from. A clear question, a direct answer, then detail.
- Your business has to be confirmed by others. Assistants trust what several independent sites say more than what you say about yourself.
AI Overviews are already common in our own market: when we checked ten AI-marketing keywords in Google Australia in October 2026, every one showed an AI Overview.
The AEO checklist
1. Build pages around real questions
Collect the questions your buyers ask, from sales calls, emails, reviews and Google’s “People also ask”, and give the important ones their own heading or page.
2. Put the direct answer first
Answer in the first two or three sentences, then explain. Assistants and AI Overviews favour passages that answer cleanly without needing the surrounding page.
3. Use scannable structure
Headings that say what the section answers, short paragraphs, lists for steps, and tables for comparisons.
4. Add structured data where it’s true
Organization or LocalBusiness on your homepage (with sameAs links to your official profiles), FAQPage for genuine question-and-answer sections, Article for guides. Only mark up what’s actually on the page.
5. Show who’s behind the content
Author names, real experience, and links to sources help both people and machines judge whether to trust a page.
6. Keep it fast, mobile-friendly and crawlable
Make sure AI search crawlers (such as OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot) aren’t blocked by robots.txt or your firewall, and that pages load quickly on a phone.
7. Create one best answer per core topic
For each thing you sell, have one page that answers it thoroughly, rather than several thin pages competing with each other.
8. Make content worth citing
Specific facts, original data, clear definitions and up-to-date information are what other sites, and assistants, quote.
9. Earn mentions where answer engines look
Reviews, directories, industry publications, comparison articles and community discussions. In our October 2026 check, LinkedIn and Reddit showed up in most of the top-ten results for AI-marketing keywords; find the equivalents in your field.
10. Measure beyond rankings
Track how often assistants name you for your buyers’ questions, who they name instead, and which sources they cite. Do it regularly, because the answers vary.
Common AEO mistakes
- Blocking AI search crawlers without realising, often through a security or CDN setting.
- Burying the answer under a long introduction.
- Marking up content that isn’t on the page, which undermines trust.
- Only working on your own site. Mentions elsewhere tend to matter most.
- Reading too much into one check. Look at the trend over several weeks.
How to choose an AEO tool
A useful AEO or AI visibility tool should:
- ask the assistants your buyers use, with their web search on, the way buyers experience them;
- ask each question several times and show a range, not a single number;
- show which competitors are named instead, and the sources behind those mentions;
- check that AI crawlers can read your site;
- track changes over time.
GroundReach’s AI visibility feature is built around those points, alongside SEO, ads and lead follow-up.
Frequently asked questions
How do I start answer engine optimisation?
Write down ten questions your buyers ask, check whether AI assistants name you for them, and fix the basics on your own site first: crawler access, clear business information and direct answers. Then work on mentions elsewhere.
What’s the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO aims to rank pages in search results; AEO aims to be named or quoted in AI-written answers. They share foundations, but AEO puts more weight on direct answers and on what other sites say about you.
How long should an answer be?
Long enough to answer completely, short enough to quote: two or three clear sentences up front, with detail below.
Does schema markup help with AEO?
It helps answer engines understand who you are and what a page contains. It isn’t a shortcut on its own, and it should only describe what’s really on the page.