AEO stands for answer engine optimisation; you might also see it called GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AI SEO. When someone asks ChatGPT, Google's AI overviews, or Perplexity a question, those tools pull from websites to build their answers. AEO is about making sure your site is one they can find, read, and cite.
It's worth paying attention to. It's also getting a lot of hype, and some of that hype is ahead of the evidence. What we offer is an honest look at where your site stands, what's worth fixing, and what's not.
What the data does show is that AI-referred traffic tends to convert well. One study found AI traffic drove sign-ups at 23 times the rate of traditional organic search, despite being a much smaller share of overall visits.
There's also a risk on the flip side. When AI can't find enough specific information about your business, it fills the gap, and research shows it gets things wrong up to 35% of the time. Clear, factual content on your own site is the fix.
What the data also shows is that the single strongest signal for AI visibility is brand mentions on other websites. That's essentially PR and content marketing work, and it's outside what a web developer can do for you. What we can help with is the technical and on-site side, which is a real and fixable part of the picture.
A one-off audit of your WordPress website covering the technical factors that affect whether AI tools can find and read your content. You get a written report in plain English with clear, prioritised recommendations.
Here's what the audit covers, and what we actually think about each one:
AI platforms each have their own web crawlers. OpenAI's is called GPTBot, Anthropic's is ClaudeBot, Google has Google Extended. If your robots.txt file is blocking any of them, those platforms can't see your content. This happens more often than you'd expect, including accidentally. Cloudflare, for example, has a setting that blocks AI crawlers by default.
Research shows that 76% of ChatGPT's top cited pages were refreshed within the last 30 days, and 90% within the past year. Stale content is a real disadvantage for AI citation. As part of the audit we'll flag pages that are likely losing ground due to age, particularly pages that already have backlinks and authority behind them.
ChatGPT's crawler can't execute JavaScript, so if your site relies on it to load its main content, those pages may appear blank to ChatGPT. Google's crawler doesn't have this limitation. Most standard WordPress and Elementor sites aren't affected by either, but it's worth confirming if your site uses a headless setup or loads content dynamically via API calls.
AI crawlers operate on tight timeouts and make one request per page; no retries. If your server is slow to respond, the crawler moves on and your content is never considered. Fast pages benefit traditional SEO as well, so it's a fix with double the payoff.
Worth mentioning because it runs against common SEO assumptions: content length has almost no correlation with AI citation. Over half of all pages cited in AI overviews are under 1,000 words. AI cares whether your page answers the question, not how long it is.
AI tools follow your HTML to make sense of your content. Clean heading structure (H1 for the page title, H2s for main sections, H3s for subsections), focused paragraphs, and sections that make sense on their own all make it easier for AI to extract useful information. We check that your site's structure helps rather than hinders.
There are a few writing principles that make content easier for AI to extract and cite. We look at whether your pages lead with the main point rather than burying it, and whether the writing is specific enough to actually be useful. This isn't about chopping content into fragments, it's about clarity. These things help human readers too, so it's not AEO-specific advice.
Schema is structured data that tells search engines and AI systems what your content is about. Whether it directly improves your chances of being cited by AI is genuinely unclear; the research is all over the place and no major AI platform has confirmed it as a signal. That said, if you have schema in place for SEO purposes, it should at least be set up correctly.
AI tools sometimes send visitors to pages that don't exist. Research shows AI assistants direct traffic to 404 error pages nearly three times more often than Google does. We check your analytics for this and recommend redirects where it makes sense.
A file designed to give AI systems a summary of your site and its key content. Google has confirmed they ignore it entirely, so it won't affect your visibility in Google Search or AI Overviews. Other platforms haven't officially confirmed support either. It's low effort to set up, so we include it, we just won't pretend it does more than it does.
If you want to go beyond the audit, we can work through the recommendations with you, help implement fixes, and advise on how your content is structured for AI readability. This includes things like how to organise FAQ sections, how to write page content that answers specific questions directly, and how to think about which topics your site should be clearly associated with.
We can also give you an honest read on where AEO is heading and what's worth watching, based on what we're seeing across the sites we work on and the research we're following.
The strongest lever for AI visibility is brand mentions on third-party websites, things like editorial coverage, review site listings, niche forums, and community platforms like Reddit. Research consistently puts this above technical factors.
That's PR and outreach work, and it's outside our lane as a web team.
Google has also flagged that chasing inauthentic mentions; paid placements, manufactured citations doesn't work, and their spam systems are built to detect it. So it's not just outside our lane; it's genuinely not worth doing.
We'll tell you where those gaps are as part of the audit. We just won't pretend we're the ones to close them.
Closely. Google has confirmed it directly: their AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on top of the same core ranking and quality systems as regular Google Search. Strong SEO is a genuine head start on AEO, at least for Google's AI features. Third-party research also shows a meaningful share of AI-cited pages don't rank in Google's top 100 at all, so it's not the only path in, but it's the most reliable starting point.
We've been doing SEO work for small business websites for over 25 years. AEO isn't a replacement for that foundation. It builds on top of it.
AEO health check: from $350 + GST depending on the size and complexity of your site. AEO consulting: $140 + GST per hour.
The businesses paying attention now are building a head start. The ones assuming nothing has changed may find they've quietly gone missing from the conversation. Tell us about your business and we'll give you a straight answer on how much you might benefit from AEO.
Or call (03) 9315 9194
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