Is AEO replacing SEO?

No: AI assistants still retrieve from indexed, crawlable web pages, so weak SEO foundations make AEO harder, and AEO is best understood as an extra measurement and content layer on top of SEO rather than a replacement. The engines read the same web Google does; they summarise it instead of listing it.

Is AEO the same as GEO?

In practice yes: AEO and GEO (generative engine optimisation) describe the same work of earning mentions and citations in AI answers. AEO is the older term, from featured snippets and voice answers; GEO is the newer coinage for generative assistants. Pick either label, then judge tools and agencies on what they actually measure.

Do I need AEO if my SEO is weak?

Fix crawlability, page speed and obvious content gaps first, because AI engines cannot cite pages they cannot read, but start measuring your AI visibility straight away so you know your baseline. A baseline taken before the fixes is the only way to see whether the fixes worked.

Why should a UK SaaS marketing manager care about AEO?

Because UK software buyers increasingly ask an assistant for a shortlist before they visit a single website: G2's March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers found 51% now start their research in an AI chatbot. If your product is not in that answer, the trial signup never starts and your analytics never record the loss.

How do AI assistants decide which SaaS products to recommend?

Assistants retrieve from crawlable product pages, review sites, directories, comparison articles and forum threads, then write an answer from what they found, so consistent facts about your product across those sources matter as much as your own website copy. Review platforms and comparison roundups carry particular weight for software questions.

Can one marketing manager run AEO and SEO together?

Yes for the monitoring and content side, which is roughly two to four hours a month once a baseline is set, but technical fixes and third-party listing work usually need specialist help. The monthly routine is a fixed question list, a spreadsheet and a set day; the specialist work is occasional and project-shaped.

How do I check whether AI assistants mention my brand?

Run a fixed list of 20 to 30 real buyer questions through each major assistant on a set schedule and record whether you are mentioned, cited or recommended, or use a tool that does this automatically each week. Keep the wording identical each time; answers vary run to run, so judge the trend over two or three months, not one result.

How long does AEO take to work?

Most teams see a baseline within a week and measurable movement in mention rate within four to twelve weeks, because engines re-crawl and re-weight sources on their own schedule. Nobody controls that schedule, so treat anyone promising faster with suspicion and judge progress on the monthly trend, not on any single answer.

What does AEO cost a small business?

Costs range from nothing but your own time for manual monthly checks, through tooling at roughly £21 to £100 a month, to expert-included retainers from around £1,495. AEOscore is £99 a month for monitoring, £1,495 a month with a named strategist, and a £395 one-off AI Visibility Audit credited against your first month.

What is llms.txt and does an SMB need it?

llms.txt is a plain text file that lists your key pages for AI crawlers: it is cheap to add and harmless, but it is not widely honoured yet, so treat it as housekeeping rather than a fix. No major AI company has documented official support for it as of August 2026.

Glossary / Core concepts

What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?

By Olly, founder of AEOscore, AEO consultant and full-stack developer, 20+ years in searchPublished 7 August 2026Updated 26 August 202613 min read

The short answer

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making sure AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode mention, cite and accurately describe your business when someone asks them a buying question. Where SEO chases rankings, AEO works on the answer itself: whether you are named and recommended at all. Also known as GEO (generative engine optimisation) and AI search optimisation.

Last updated 26 August 2026

Key takeaways

AEO (also called GEO) is the work of getting your business named, cited and accurately described inside AI assistants’ answers, not just ranked underneath them.
Assistants build answers from crawlable pages and third-party sources, so directories, reviews and comparison articles matter as much as your own site.
You measure it by asking each engine a fixed set of real buyer questions on a schedule and scoring mentions, citations and recommendations per engine over time.

AEO vs SEO: what actually changes

SEO works to rank your page in a list of blue links, while AEO works to get your business named inside the answer itself, so the two share tactics like crawlable content and third-party authority but are measured completely differently.

	SEO	AEO
Goal	Rank a page in the list of results for a query	Get the business named, cited and described accurately inside the answer
What you optimise	Pages: keywords, links, technical health, speed	The evidence engines read: crawlable pages, third-party mentions, reviews, directories, consistent facts about the business
Where the user sees you	A results page, one of ten blue links, plus ads and features	One or two sentences of a chatbot or AI Overview answer, often with no click at all
How you measure success	Rankings, impressions, clicks, organic sessions	Mention rate, citation rate, recommendation rate across a fixed set of buyer questions, per engine, over time
Typical timescale	Three to twelve months for competitive terms	Baseline in a week; movement in four to twelve weeks; engines re-crawl and re-weight on their own schedule

The overlap is real. A page that is fast, crawlable, specific and corroborated elsewhere does well in both. The split is in what you count. An SEO report can show you at position three with rising clicks while ChatGPT, asked the same buyer’s question, names three rivals and not you. Nothing in Search Console will tell you that. You have to ask the engines.

Where does GEO fit? Nowhere new: generative engine optimisation is the same discipline under a different name, more common in American writing, with AEO gaining ground in the UK. You will also meet AI search optimisation and LLM SEO. Whatever the label on the tin, the work is the AEO column above. If your team is larger and you want this comparison worked through operationally, budget, ownership, metrics and a first-90-days plan, that is our GEO vs traditional SEO guide for mid-market B2B.

Does an SMB marketing manager need AEO alongside SEO?

Yes, alongside rather than instead of: SEO still drives the majority of trackable traffic for most small and mid-sized businesses, but AI assistants now shortlist suppliers before a click happens, so a marketing manager needs both, with AEO layered on once basic SEO fundamentals are in place.

For a team of one or two: SEO is still where the measurable visits come from, and it is not optional. What has changed is that a growing part of the buying decision now happens in an answer you cannot see in your analytics. Someone asks an assistant for a commercial insurance broker for a ten-person firm in Leeds, gets three names, and rings one. If you are not one of the three, no ranking saves you, and no report you currently run will show the miss.

Most SMBs should keep the SEO work they already do, add a monthly check of what the assistants say, and act on the gaps that check reveals. The rest of this page is what that involves and what it costs.

“The first mistake I see is a marketing manager opening Google Analytics, finding almost no AI traffic, and concluding it does not matter, when the assistants were shortlisting suppliers before anyone clicked.”
Olly, founder of AEOscore, AEO consultant and full-stack developer

AEO for a UK SaaS marketing manager

SaaS is where AEO bites hardest, because software buyers now ask assistants for shortlists before they visit a vendor site: in G2’s March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers, 51% started their research in an AI chatbot rather than a search engine.

The same G2 survey (published May 2026) found 71% of software buyers now lean on chatbots for research, up from 60% a year earlier, and 69% ended up choosing a different vendor than they first planned because of what an assistant told them. For a product bought after a demo or a free trial, the shortlist is most of the battle, and the shortlist is increasingly written by a machine.

Three question types decide whether that machine writes you in.

Category questions.“Best CRM for UK SMEs”, “project management tool for a 20-person agency”. These form the shortlist. If you are absent here, the later questions never mention you either.
Comparison questions.“X vs Y”, “alternatives to the market leader”. Engines lean heavily on review sites and comparison articles for these, which is why third-party listings matter so much for software.
Qualifier questions. Integrations, pricing, GDPR and UK data residency. UK buyers ask UK-qualified versions of all of these, and if no UK vendor is visible the engines fall back on the US-centric sources that dominate the category.

Try the three question types

Which answers is your product in?

Pick a question type and see how the answer treats a vendor the engines cannot find.

best CRM for UK SMEs

Rival Afrom a comparison roundup

Rival Bfrom a review site

Rival Cfrom its own pricing page

you: not named · rivals named: 3

The shortlist forms in this answer. A product missing here never reaches the later questions, and the buyer never reaches your site.

What it costs you when you are missing is a trial that never starts, and there is no analytics trace of the loss: the buyer read the answer, shortlisted three rivals and never touched your site. The visits you do get from AI answers are worth having, too. Semrush research from June 2025 put the average AI-search visitor at 4.4 times the value of a traditional organic visitor, measured by conversion rate.

What a SaaS marketing manager should measure is the same panel discipline as the rest of this page: mention rate, citation rate and recommendation rate, per engine, on a fixed set of the category, comparison and qualifier questions your buyers actually ask. Track it monthly and treat the trend as the number. The AI share of voice guide shows how to run that panel and report it.

“For SaaS, a missing mention is a free trial that never started, and no dashboard you own will ever report it.”
Olly, founder of AEOscore

How AI assistants build an answer about your business

AI assistants retrieve from crawlable web pages, third-party mentions, review sites and directories, then write a short answer from whatever they found, so the businesses named are the ones the engine could read and could corroborate.

In practice that means four things decide whether you appear. Whether the AI crawlers can fetch your pages at all. Whether other sites (directories, trade bodies, review platforms, roundups, forums, the local press) mention you, and describe you the same way you describe yourself. Whether your pages state plain facts an engine can lift: what you do, for whom, where, from what price. And whether a rival has already become the name the engine reaches for on that topic. Each engine weighs those differently and answers vary between runs, which is why AEO is measured on a panel of questions over time rather than one query on one day. The longer version, with the five usual reasons a business is missing, is in Why doesn’t ChatGPT recommend my business?.

Why this matters now

54% of UK adults now use AI tools, AI answers sit on a large share of Google searches, and when they appear people click far less, so the answer is already where a growing part of the shortlist is formed.

54% of UK adults use AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Gemini, and 79% of 16 to 24 year olds. Ofcom, April 2026.
Around 30% of keyword search queries in the UK deliver AI-supported overviews. Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, December 2025.
When an AI summary appears, US Google users click a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% when it does not. Pew Research Center, July 2025, from 68,879 real searches in March 2025.
Organic click-through on queries showing a Google AI Overview fell from 1.76% in June 2024 to 0.61% in September 2025. Seer Interactive, November 2025.
ChatGPT reached 800 million weekly active users. OpenAI, October 2025.
Visitors referred by AI assistants converted 31% better than other traffic over the 2025 holiday season. Adobe Analytics, January 2026 (US retail; the closest credible measure of AI-referral intent we have found, and not a B2B figure).
In our own sample of 304 UK B2B searches on 17 August 2026, 71% showed a Google AI Overview, including 60% of supplier-intent queries. AEOscore, research page.

Every figure above is linked in the sources at the foot of this page and dated. Numbers in this field move quickly; we re-check them quarterly.

What an SMB marketing manager can do in the first 30 days

In the first 30 days a marketing manager can take a baseline, fix the plain-fact pages, and get the business listed accurately in the places engines read, none of which needs a developer.

Write down 20 to 30 questions your buyers actually ask, in their words: “who does payroll for a 15-person firm in Bristol”, not “payroll services”. Include two or three where you name a rival.
Ask each question in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google (for the AI Overview) and record in a sheet whether you are mentioned, cited (linked) or recommended. That sheet is your baseline. Expect it to be mostly empty.
Ask the engines what they know about your company by name. Note anything wrong: old address, dead product, wrong price. Those errors come from your own pages or a stale listing somewhere.
Fix the plain-fact pages: home, about, each main service page. Each should say in ordinary sentences what you do, who for, where, from what price, and who the people are. Remove anything out of date.
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile and the two or three directories or trade bodies your sector actually uses. Same name, same address, same one-line description everywhere.
Ask five recent clients for a review on the platform your buyers check. Reviews are one of the sources assistants lean on when they recommend.
Add one question to your enquiry form: “How did you hear about us?” with an AI assistant option. It is the only reliable way to see AI-influenced enquiries, since most never carry a referral tag.
Put the question run in the diary for the same day next month. The value is in the trend.

What needs specialist help

Three jobs usually need someone technical or someone with time you do not have: opening the site to AI crawlers, remediating thin or contradictory pages at scale, and getting listed in the third-party sources engines lean on.

Crawler access first. Many sites block AI crawlers by accident: a firewall rule, a robots.txt copied from a template, a page that only renders after JavaScript runs. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot cannot fetch the page, nothing else on this list matters. Checking the server logs and the robots file is a developer’s job.

Then the pages themselves. Once the baseline shows which questions you are missing from, the fix is usually a page that answers that question plainly, with the specifics an engine can quote. On a site with a hundred old blog posts saying slightly different things, that is editing work, not just writing, and it takes days.

Then the sources. Engines cite the roundups, comparison pages, directories and forum threads that already rank. Getting onto them is outreach: finding the pages, asking, following up. It is the part most SMBs never do because nobody owns it.

For the record, this is what AEOscore does and how it works. Every account runs a fixed panel of real buyer questions (up to 40 active prompts on bundled tiers) through six engines every week: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode. Each answer is scored on whether you are mentioned, cited and recommended, and the panel rolls up to a score out of 100 you can watch move. Every gap gets a written fix plan on every tier. On the top tier a named UK expert spends a day a month doing the three jobs above. The method is public on the methodology page.

“If the site is slow, thin or blocked to crawlers, AEO is not worth paying for yet: fix that first, then measure.”
Olly, founder of AEOscore

What AEO costs an SMB

Costs range from nothing but your own time for manual monthly checks, through tooling at roughly £21 to £100 a month, to expert-included monthly retainers from around £1,495, depending on whether you want reporting only or someone to fix what the report finds.

Band	What you get	Cost
Do it yourself	The 30-day list above, repeated monthly. Manual, so the question set stays small and consistency depends on you.	Two to four hours a month of your time once the baseline exists; a full day for the first pass.
Tooling	Automated weekly checks across the engines, a score, rival tracking, written fix plans. You do the fixing.	£99 a month with the API costs bundled (AEOscore); other tools start at about £21 to £73 a month and rise from there (compared in pounds on our compare page).
Expert included	The tooling plus a named person spending time each month on your site, your pages and your listings.	From £1,495 a month (AEOscore, a strategist and developer day every month with the changes made for you, monthly); typical UK agency retainers with strategist hours start around £1,500 a month.

For AEOscore specifically, in plain figures: Monitor is £99 a month, Monitor + Strategist is £1,495 a month, and a one-off AI Visibility Audit is £395, credited against your first month if you continue.

Which band fits depends on one question: when the report shows a gap, who is going to close it? If the answer is you, tooling is enough. If the answer is nobody, that is what the expert tier is for. Current tiers, what each includes and the fair-use limits are on the pricing page; rival prices in pounds are in the tools pricing comparison.

Common mistakes

The three commonest mistakes are judging AEO by AI referral traffic in Google Analytics, publishing more blog posts, and assuming schema markup does the job on its own.

Chasing AI traffic in Google Analytics. Most AI influence never produces a tagged visit: the buyer reads the answer, then searches your name or phones. GA4 records the visit if there is one; the decision happened earlier. Measure mentions in the answers and branded searches instead.
Publishing more blogs. Volume is not the gap. Ten pages that each answer one buyer question plainly, with prices, names and proof, beat a hundred posts that circle the topic. Rewrite before you add.
Assuming schema alone does it. Structured data helps machines parse what is already on the page; it does not create the evidence engines need. Add it as housekeeping, then spend the effort on the pages and the third-party mentions. See schema markup.
Testing once and drawing conclusions. Answers vary run to run and engine to engine. One prompt on one day proves nothing; run the same panel monthly.
Blocking AI crawlers to protect content. For a business that wants enquiries, being unreadable to the engines removes you from the answer and leaves your rivals in it.

“Ask ChatGPT who it would recommend for what you sell, in your area. If you are not in the answer, that is your starting score.”
Olly, founder of AEOscore

Frequently asked questions

Is AEO replacing SEO?: No: AI assistants still retrieve from indexed, crawlable web pages, so weak SEO foundations make AEO harder, and AEO is best understood as an extra measurement and content layer on top of SEO rather than a replacement. The engines read the same web Google does; they summarise it instead of listing it.
Is AEO the same as GEO?: In practice yes: AEO and GEO (generative engine optimisation) describe the same work of earning mentions and citations in AI answers. AEO is the older term, from featured snippets and voice answers; GEO is the newer coinage for generative assistants. Pick either label, then judge tools and agencies on what they actually measure.
Do I need AEO if my SEO is weak?: Fix crawlability, page speed and obvious content gaps first, because AI engines cannot cite pages they cannot read, but start measuring your AI visibility straight away so you know your baseline. A baseline taken before the fixes is the only way to see whether the fixes worked.
Why should a UK SaaS marketing manager care about AEO?: Because UK software buyers increasingly ask an assistant for a shortlist before they visit a single website: G2's March 2026 survey of 1,076 B2B software buyers found 51% now start their research in an AI chatbot. If your product is not in that answer, the trial signup never starts and your analytics never record the loss.
How do AI assistants decide which SaaS products to recommend?: Assistants retrieve from crawlable product pages, review sites, directories, comparison articles and forum threads, then write an answer from what they found, so consistent facts about your product across those sources matter as much as your own website copy. Review platforms and comparison roundups carry particular weight for software questions.
Can one marketing manager run AEO and SEO together?: Yes for the monitoring and content side, which is roughly two to four hours a month once a baseline is set, but technical fixes and third-party listing work usually need specialist help. The monthly routine is a fixed question list, a spreadsheet and a set day; the specialist work is occasional and project-shaped.
How do I check whether AI assistants mention my brand?: Run a fixed list of 20 to 30 real buyer questions through each major assistant on a set schedule and record whether you are mentioned, cited or recommended, or use a tool that does this automatically each week. Keep the wording identical each time; answers vary run to run, so judge the trend over two or three months, not one result.
How long does AEO take to work?: Most teams see a baseline within a week and measurable movement in mention rate within four to twelve weeks, because engines re-crawl and re-weight sources on their own schedule. Nobody controls that schedule, so treat anyone promising faster with suspicion and judge progress on the monthly trend, not on any single answer.
What does AEO cost a small business?: Costs range from nothing but your own time for manual monthly checks, through tooling at roughly £21 to £100 a month, to expert-included retainers from around £1,495. AEOscore is £99 a month for monitoring, £1,495 a month with a named strategist, and a £395 one-off AI Visibility Audit credited against your first month.
What is llms.txt and does an SMB need it?: llms.txt is a plain text file that lists your key pages for AI crawlers: it is cheap to add and harmless, but it is not widely honoured yet, so treat it as housekeeping rather than a fix. No major AI company has documented official support for it as of August 2026.

What changed on this page

24 August 2026: UK SaaS marketing manager section added with G2 (May 2026) and Semrush (June 2025) statistics, GEO covered in the definition and under the comparison table, key takeaways added, FAQ grown to ten, pricing restated in pounds.
18 August 2026: Rebuilt as a long-form explainer: AEO vs SEO table, 30-day plan, costs in pounds, FAQ, and dated statistics with a sources list.

Keep reading

Related terms

Quick tips that use this

Go deeper on AEOscore

Sources

Ofcom: UK adults' media and online lives (54% use AI tools), April 2026 (accessed 17 August 2026)
Ofcom: Online Nation 2025 (around 30% of keyword searches deliver AI overviews), December 2025 (accessed 17 August 2026)
Pew Research Center: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears, July 2025 (accessed 17 August 2026)
Seer Interactive: AIO impact on Google CTR, September 2025 update (published November 2025) (accessed 17 August 2026)
CNBC: OpenAI DevDay, ChatGPT at 800 million weekly active users, October 2025 (accessed 17 August 2026)
Adobe Analytics via Digital Transactions: AI referrals converted 31% better over holiday 2025, January 2026 (accessed 17 August 2026)
Search Engine Land: Google AI Overviews drive 61% drop in organic CTR, November 2025 (accessed 17 August 2026)
AEOscore: UK B2B AI Overview trigger-rate study, 17 August 2026 (accessed 17 August 2026)
Semrush research via MarTech: the average AI-search visitor is worth 4.4x a traditional organic visitor, June 2025 (accessed 24 August 2026)
G2, The Answer Economy (via Demand Gen Report): 51% of B2B software buyers start research in an AI chatbot, survey of 1,076 buyers, March 2026, published May 2026 (accessed 24 August 2026)

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