Search has a new front door
More people now ask an AI assistant before they ever open a search results page. Those assistants summarise the web and cite a handful of sources. If your business is not one of them, you are invisible at the exact moment someone is deciding.
What answer engines look for
Clear, well-structured pages that answer a specific question directly. Consistent facts about your business across the web. Structured data that tells machines what a page is about. And authority signals: real expertise, real reviews, and other sites referencing you.
Where to start
Audit the questions your customers actually ask, then make sure each has a focused, plainly written answer on your site. Add schema markup for your organisation, services and FAQs. Fix crawl and speed issues first; an answer engine cannot cite a page it cannot read.
SEO still matters
AEO builds on good technical SEO rather than replacing it. The same foundations, fast pages, clean markup and sensible structure, are what make your content easy for both search engines and AI models to trust.