AI search, answered.

AEO is the work of becoming the source an AI engine cites when it answers your buyers' questions. It builds on SEO: the technical and content fundamentals still matter, but the target is being named in the answer rather than listed below it.

• What is AEO, and how is it different from SEO?

A summary Google generates at the top of some results pages, written from a set of sources it selects and links. Google does not show one for every query, and the sources it uses can change between searches.

A named reference to a business or a page inside an AI-generated answer, usually as a link or a source card. It is different from a ranking: you can rank first in classic results and not appear in the answer above them.

In practice these labels describe overlapping work. GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, LLMO for large language model optimisation. Nobody owns the vocabulary and it is still settling. Ask any supplier what work the label actually covers and what they will measure, rather than comparing acronyms.

Google's AI Overviews, because Google still carries the most search volume, then ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Which of them matters most depends on your buyers. A business selling to software teams and one selling to homeowners will not see the same mix.

Some do and some do not. An answer that fully resolves the question can end the session there, which is the zero-click pattern. An answer that names suppliers for a considered purchase often does send the reader on. The second kind is where the commercial value sits.

AI answers are generated rather than looked up, so they vary between users, devices, locations, sessions and over time. This is the single most important thing to understand before you judge any AEO work: one screenshot is an anecdote, not a measurement.

No. The groundwork that makes a site legible to a search engine is the same groundwork that makes it legible to an AI engine. What changed is the outcome worth measuring: being named in an answer, as well as being listed in results.

• Did AI kill SEO?

A lot of the work overlaps, and any supplier claiming it is an entirely new discipline is overselling. The honest difference is what gets targeted and checked. Ask what changes in the actual work before paying for a new label.

• Did AI kill SEO?

Yes. Rankings still carry traffic, and for Google's AI features a page generally needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in search before it can support an Overview. Rankings are no longer the whole picture, but they have not stopped mattering.

Broadly: whether your pages can be accessed and understood, whether the business facts about you are consistent wherever they appear, whether there is content that directly answers the question being asked, and whether other credible sources corroborate you. No supplier can give you a precise formula, because the engines do not publish one.

• How AI engines choose who to cite

No. The two are related but separate. Ranking well makes a page eligible and visible; it does not oblige an engine to name you in a generated answer.

• How AI engines choose who to cite

Not necessarily. An engine can cite a page as evidence for a claim without endorsing the business, and it can name you in a list without ranking you first. Read what the answer actually says about you, not just whether your name appears.

• How AI engines choose who to cite

No. FAQ blocks help when people genuinely ask those questions and the answers are specific. Bolting a generic FAQ onto every page adds words without adding information, and engines are reasonably good at telling the difference.

• What is AEO?

Almost never. The usual sequence is to fix access and structure first, then write against the specific questions your buyers ask, then improve what is already close. A full rewrite is a large bill for work that mostly is not the constraint.

• What is AEO?

Only if the content answers questions people actually ask and is better than what already answers them. Volume on its own tends to produce pages nobody asked for, which dilute a site rather than strengthen it.

They are part of how a business gets corroborated. An engine assembling an answer about suppliers has an easier job when independent sources say consistent things about you. This is why credibility work sits alongside content work rather than after it.

Not in the organic part of one. Advertising slots around AI features are a separate product from the generated answer and its sources. If someone offers to buy you a citation, ask exactly what they are buying.

If your competitors are easier to read, more consistently described and better corroborated, then yes, they are the likelier source. Doing nothing is a decision with a cost, but it is a gradual one rather than a cliff.

No supplier can guarantee the behaviour of a system they do not control. What can be agreed in advance is a specific, written target: which questions, which engines, and what counts as success. Anything vaguer than that is not a guarantee.

• What is AEO?

Ask the questions your buyers would ask, across the engines that matter to you, and record the question, the engine, the date, the answer and the sources it cited. Keep the wording and the method stable so that checks are comparable to one another.

• How long does AEO take to work?

No. Because answers vary between checks, a single favourable result cannot distinguish a real improvement from normal variation. Repeated checks over time, against a stable question set, are the only thing that can.

• How AI engines choose who to cite

Research, technical work and publishing all need to happen before there is much evidence to look at. Expect the first quarter to be foundations. That creates an observation period; it does not make the outcome certain.

• How long does AEO take to work?

Enquiries and their source, branded search volume, which pages get cited when you are cited, and whether the questions you can answer well are growing. Citations are the headline; these tell you whether it is translating into anything.

They automate the checking and give you a time series, which is genuinely useful. Treat their absolute numbers with care: each tool asks its own questions in its own way, so two tools will rarely agree, and neither is ground truth.

Partly. Referrals from some AI products appear as their own sources, so you can see visits arriving from them. What you cannot see is the answers where you were named and nobody clicked, which is why answer-level checking matters alongside analytics.

Then the written target is the thing to look at, because it says what was supposed to happen by when. A programme that cannot point at an agreed target at that stage was not set up to be judged.

• How long does AEO take to work?

Structured data is machine-readable markup that states plainly what a page is and what it says. It does not force an engine to do anything, but it removes ambiguity about your business facts, which is cheap to fix and expensive to leave broken.

For most businesses: Organization and LocalBusiness for who you are, Service or Product for what you sell, Article for what you publish, FAQPage where you genuinely answer questions, and BreadcrumbList for structure. Beyond those the returns fall away quickly.

• AEO glossary

A plain-text file at the root of a site that lists its pages and what they are for, in a form a language model can read easily. It is a proposed convention rather than a standard, and no engine is obliged to use it. It is cheap to publish and does no harm.

That depends on whether you want to be cited. Blocking a crawler in robots.txt removes you from the source pool it feeds. Some publishers do this deliberately to protect content they sell. If your goal is to be recommended to buyers, blocking is working against you.

Indirectly. A page that is slow or fragile is harder to crawl and render reliably, and it converts worse when someone does arrive. It is not a citation lever on its own, but it sits underneath everything that is.

Less reliably than server-rendered content. Crawlers differ in whether and when they run JavaScript, so anything important that only exists after a script runs is at risk of not being seen. Rendering the substance on the server removes that risk.

An entity is the thing itself, your business, as distinct from any one page about it. Engines try to resolve mentions across the web to a single entity. Consistent name, address, description and links across every profile is what makes that resolution easy.

• AEO glossary

No. Indexed means eligible to be considered. Ranked means shown for something. Cited means named in an answer. A report that claims visibility from index coverage alone is measuring the easiest stage.

• AEO glossary

Visibility is £1,500 a month on a six-month minimum, Domination is £3,000 a month on a six-month minimum, and Authority is £6,000 a month on a twelve-month minimum. There are no setup fees.

• Services and pricing

Because the work that moves a small local firm and the work that moves a business trying to own a national niche are different in scale, not just in price. The tiers differ in content volume, the amount of human strategy, and how much credibility and PR work sits alongside the technical foundation.

• Services and pricing

Because the work compounds and the first quarter is foundations. A shorter commitment would have you judging the programme at the point it is least judgeable. After the minimum, we expect to be kept on results, not contracts.

There is a service agreement with a minimum term, then 30 days' notice. No setup fees, paid by Direct Debit.

Guaranteed citations in 90 days, or we work free until you have them. The citation target is agreed in writing before you sign, so both sides know what counts before the clock starts.

From your buyers' actual questions and the engines that matter to you, agreed and written down before the agreement is signed. A target invented afterwards would not be a target.

• Services and pricing

Paid advertising and paid media are outside scope. We do not own your sales follow-up: we can build the machinery that delivers enquiries, but converting them is your team's job. Information and approvals stay with you, and work waits on them.

• Services and pricing

No. Paid advertising is outside the scope of these programmes.

Website work sits inside the higher tiers rather than being sold separately. Authority includes a complete rebuild.

The programmes are built around UK businesses and UK buyers. Get in touch if you are elsewhere and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.

• Contact

An access checklist returned at the start, the business information that makes the research accurate, and approvals when they are asked for. Nothing else moves until the checklist is back, which is the most common cause of a slow first month.

• How it works

That depends on the tier. Visibility runs on the engine itself. Domination adds a senior strategist and a delivery pod. Authority adds a dedicated team.

• About WebWisp

Yes. The tiers are the same engine at different intensities, so moving between them is a change of scope rather than a restart.

• What AI search visibility costs in the UK

The free AI visibility audit costs nothing and tells you where you stand. Beyond that, the honest answer is that below a certain level of effort the work does not compound, so we would rather tell you that than sell you a version of it that cannot work.

• Free AI visibility audit

WebWisp builds AI-powered platforms alongside the search programmes. If that is what you need, say so when you get in touch and we will tell you whether it is something we do.

• Contact

Yes. £500 for a referral that becomes a client.

• Refer a client

Yes. No card, no commitment. You get a short written report and a 30-minute walkthrough within three working days.

• Free AI visibility audit

No. The audit runs entirely from the outside. We test the questions your buyers ask across Google and four AI platforms and report what we find.

Whether you appear, who appears instead, and which of your pages are being cited, across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's classic organic results.

• Free AI visibility audit

You will know where you stand and the three fixes that would move the needle first. If a programme makes sense we will say which one and why. If it does not, we will say that too.

No. It is a snapshot of what the engines said when we checked. AI answers vary between users and over time, so the audit tells you where you are starting from rather than where you will end up.