Answer engine optimization services
Being the answer rather than a result. We restructure the pages that already have the expertise so an engine can lift a clean, correct passage from them, and we score every page against that before it goes live.
Answer engine optimization is the work of making a page the answer a system extracts rather than a link it lists. It covers featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice results and AI answers, and it is mostly a structure problem: the answer has to be stated plainly, early, and be attributable to a named source.
- Where it lands
- 4 surfaces
- Scored before publish
- 100%
- Typical rewrite
- The first 60 words
- From
- $99/mo
snippets, People Also Ask, voice and AI answers
every page, on extractability and attribution
not the whole page, in most cases
month to month, no minimum term
Why good pages lose the answer slot
These pages usually rank. That is what makes this frustrating: the expertise is already there and the extraction fails anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with quality.
The answer is in paragraph nine
Most business writing warms up first: context, then background, then the answer. Extraction reads the opening. A page that states its conclusion after 400 words of preamble is a page that gets skimmed and skipped, however good paragraph nine is.
Nothing on the page is a question
Answer surfaces are matched against questions. A page whose headings are noun phrases gives a matcher nothing to align to, while the same content with the real question as an H2 and the answer directly under it becomes eligible for a slot it was never in contention for.
Nobody signed it
An answer that gets extracted is an answer something is willing to attribute. A page with no named author, no date and no sources reads as unattributable, and our own engine scores that as unattributed, which is exactly what a competing system sees.
What an AEO engagement ships
Most of this is restructuring rather than writing. The single most common change we make is moving an answer that already exists to the top of a page that already ranks.
A question map from your real queries
Every question your buyers actually ask, taken from your Search Console data and the People Also Ask sets around your terms, mapped against the page that should own each one. This is what stops two pages competing for the same answer.
Direct answer blocks, page by page
A 40 to 60 word answer in the opening position, stating the conclusion before the reasoning. It is the highest leverage single edit in this whole discipline and it is usually a rewrite of one paragraph.
Questions promoted to headings
Headings rewritten as the question a person types, with the answer immediately beneath, and a heading order that does not skip levels. The order matters more than people expect: a document outline that jumps H2 to H4 is harder to parse into a passage.
FAQPage and HowTo schema where earned
Structured data on the pages that genuinely carry questions or a procedure, validated against the deployed HTML rather than a preview, because a block that fails to parse is ignored silently and looks identical to one that works.
Attribution the page can prove
A named author with credentials, published and modified dates emitted in the markup as well as shown to the reader, and every factual claim carrying its source. Our engine reads exactly these fields, so we score the page the way an extractor sees it.
A pre publish gate
Nothing ships until it scores. Every page is run through the audit for extractability, attribution and freshness before it goes live, and a piece that would fail the audit does not go out with our name on it.
How an AEO engagement runs
It starts with pages you already own, because retrofitting an existing ranking page is cheaper and faster than earning a new one.
- 01
Inventory what already ranks
Pull the pages already earning impressions on question shaped queries. These are the ones sitting closest to an answer slot they are not winning, and they are where the first month goes.
- 02
Restructure, do not rewrite
Answer to the top, questions into headings, outline repaired, sources attached. The expertise stays exactly as it was; what changes is whether a machine can find the part of it that answers the question.
- 03
Add the missing questions
Where the map shows a question no page owns, one gets written. Answer first, sourced, signed and scored, in the same format as the retrofits so the site reads as one thing.
- 04
Recheck and hold the line
Answer slots are lost as easily as they are won, usually to a page that got fresher. Monthly rechecks catch the losses, and the freshness signal is maintained honestly rather than by touching a date field.
What gets measured, and what cannot be
Two of the three AEO surfaces are checkable directly. Featured snippets and People Also Ask can be observed for a given query, and movement in and out of them is visible in Search Console impressions and position data. That is ordinary reporting and we do it monthly.
The third surface, AI answers, is not deterministic, so it is measured as a rate across a prompt set rather than as a position. The distinction matters: a snippet you either hold or you do not, an AI citation you hold at some frequency. Reporting the second like the first is how this category produces numbers nobody can reproduce.
Underneath both is the part that is fully deterministic and fully yours to check: whether each page states an answer in its opening, whether its headings are questions, whether its schema parses, whether it names an author and a date. Our engine scores those on your live pages and you can rerun it yourself any time.
The related discipline is generative engine optimization, which asks the broader question of whether you are named at all. Most engagements need both and we run them together rather than selling them twice.
Check whether a page is extractable
Point these at the page you most want to win an answer for. Between them they cover the structure, the markup and the attribution an extractor reads.
Or run the same interrogation by hand: what answer engine optimization is, an AEO plan step by step, structuring an article to be quoted. Free, no account, and the honest version of the do it yourself option.
What buyers ask about AEO
What is answer engine optimization?
Optimising a page to be the extracted answer to a question rather than one result among ten. It applies to featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants and AI generated answers. In practice it is a structure and attribution discipline: state the answer plainly and early, use the real question as the heading, and make the page attributable with a named author, a date and sources. Our full explainer covers the history and the zero click trade off that comes with winning.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
No, though they overlap heavily. AEO is about winning a specific answer to a specific question, and it predates AI: featured snippets have worked this way for years. GEO is about being named at all inside a generated answer, across engines. Our GEO services page covers that side.
Do we need new content or can you fix what we have?
Most of the first month is retrofitting. Pages that already rank on question shaped queries are the closest to an answer slot, and moving the answer to the opening plus repairing the headings is usually enough to put them in contention. New pages come after, only for questions nothing you own currently answers.
Does schema markup actually win featured snippets?
Not on its own, and anyone selling it that way is overselling. Schema makes a page machine readable and makes it eligible for specific rich results; the answer slot is won by the opening passage. FAQPage schema on a page whose answer is in paragraph nine changes nothing. We do both, in that order of importance.
How do you stop your own pages competing with each other?
The question map. Every question is assigned exactly one page that owns it, and the others link to that page rather than answering it again. Two of your pages fighting over one answer is one of the most common findings in an AEO audit and it is entirely self inflicted.
What does AEO cost?
Agency retainers for AEO sit in the same band as GEO, roughly $2,500 to $25,000 a month, and almost none of them publish a figure. Ours are $99, $299 and $799 a month. The full named comparison is on what GEO costs.
Will this hurt how the page reads for humans?
It improves it, in our experience, and that is not a slogan. Stating your conclusion first and using the reader’s own question as a heading is what good technical writing already does. The version that extracts well is usually the version somebody actually finishes reading.
Score one page before you commit to anything
Pick the page you most want to own an answer for and run it through the audit. You will get the extractability, attribution and structure findings in about a minute, and they are the same ones we would open a proposal with.