Answer engines use AI to understand your question, fetch information from multiple sources, and generate a direct, conversational answer, usually with a few cited links.

Search engines mainly return a ranked list of links and expect you to click, compare, and piece together the answer yourself.

Review and update key pages whenever information changes, and schedule regular content audits—typically every three months for competitive topics and every six to twelve months for evergreen resources.

Start with high-intent pages that answer specific questions your audience searches for. Service pages, FAQs, and how-to guides tend to align best with how AI engines extract answers.

The core principles—clear structure, schema markup, and quality content—apply across all AI engines. Minor differences exist in how each weights freshness and source authority, but the fundamentals remain the same.

Social signals contribute to brand authority and entity recognition, which indirectly supports AEO by reinforcing what your business is known for.

AEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Strong SEO foundations make AEO more effective.

Initial improvements can appear within weeks. Consistent AI citation typically requires ongoing effort over several months.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is a way of structuring your website content so that it is cited and used by LLM's. It's basically SEO best practices updated to deal with AI search.

Well, according to one report, 95% of ChatGPT citations come from content that has been updated in the last 10 months. So, keeping the content on your website current, and accurate, is even more important in the age of AI search.