Guide

What is AEO? Answer Engine Optimisation explained for Australian businesses

Published 16 July 2026 · AI Advertising

TL;DR: AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is the work of getting your business named inside AI-generated answers, the ones ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI give when a customer asks "who should I use?". It builds on SEO but adds machine-readability work most sites have never done: structured data, llms.txt, AI-crawler access and answer-shaped content. The businesses that do it early tend to become the default answers in their category.

The problem AEO solves

For twenty years, being found online meant ranking in a list of blue links. That model is dissolving. Google now answers many searches directly with AI Overviews before any link appears. Hundreds of millions of people ask ChatGPT questions every week, and a growing share of those questions are commercial: best physio near me, who should renovate my kitchen, is this company legit.

An AI answer doesn't show ten options. It names one, two, maybe three. Either your business is in that answer or, as far as that customer is concerned, you don't exist. AEO is the discipline of earning that place.

How AI assistants decide who to recommend

No one outside the AI labs knows the full recipe, and anyone claiming they do is selling something. But the observable mechanics are consistent and well documented:

They read the web through crawlers. GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended fetch pages just like Googlebot does. We see them daily in the server logs of the 70+ sites our team runs. If they can't read your site, you're not in the training data or the live retrieval.
They retrieve before they answer. Modern assistants search the live web, then compose an answer from what they find. Pages that answer the question directly, in clean text, get quoted. Pages that bury the answer in marketing copy get skipped.
They lean on structured facts. Schema markup (JSON-LD) hands the AI your facts in machine form: what you do, where, your reviews, your FAQs. Unambiguous facts are safer for an AI to repeat, so it repeats them.
They trust corroboration. If your name, services and location are consistent across your site, directories, reviews and the pages AI already cites, you look like a safe answer. If the web disagrees with itself about you, you look like a risk, and AIs avoid risky answers.

AEO vs SEO: what actually changes

Good news first: SEO is not wasted. Sites that rank well are disproportionately represented in AI answers, because assistants retrieve from the same web Google indexes. SEO remains the foundation.

What changes is the target. SEO optimises for a ranking; AEO optimises for a citation. In practice that adds work SEO never required:

llms.txt — a plain-text file at your domain root summarising who you are and what you do, written for AI models. It's young as standards go, but it costs little and the major AI crawlers fetch it.
AI-crawler access — robots.txt rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. Many hosts and CDNs block these by default. Owners rarely know. Blocked crawler, invisible business.
Answer-shaped content — pages built as direct answers to real questions, with the question as the heading and the answer in the first sentence, not five paragraphs of throat-clearing.
Schema depth — beyond basic Organization markup: services, FAQs, reviews, offers, all in valid JSON-LD, all matching the visible page exactly.
No-JavaScript readability — several AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript. A site that renders blank without it is a site they never read.

The checklist we run

This is the exact signal list from our own audits. Run it on your site today:

Does yourdomain.com.au/llms.txt exist and describe your business accurately?
Does your robots.txt allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended?
Does every key page carry valid JSON-LD for your organisation, services and FAQs?
Does your homepage still make sense with JavaScript turned off?
Do you have pages that answer, in the first sentence, the questions customers actually ask?
Is your sitemap.xml current, and do your pages carry visible dates?
Are your name, services and location consistent everywhere they appear online?
When you ask ChatGPT and Google AI about your category in your area, are you named?

Item 8 is the scoreboard. Everything above it is how you move the score.

Does AEO actually work?

The honest answer: the mechanics are real and measurable, the industry statistics mostly aren't. You'll read claims like "40% of consumers now buy via AI recommendations", usually with no source that survives a second look. Ignore them. What you can measure, on your own site, is real: AI crawlers fetching your pages (server logs), referral visits from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai (analytics), and the assistants' actual answers to your customers' questions, re-run monthly. That's the evidence standard we hold our own work to, and the one you should hold any agency to.

Where to start

If you do nothing else this month: check item 2 (crawler access) and item 1 (llms.txt). They're the cheapest fixes with the clearest effect, and they're the two we find broken most often. Or request our free audit and we'll run the whole checklist for you, including the transcript of what AI currently says about your business.