What is answer engine optimisation?
When a buyer asks an AI assistant to explain a category, compare two platforms or suggest vendors for a problem, the engine writes an answer from the sources it has retrieved and, more and more often, cites them. AEO is the discipline of being one of those sources, and of being described accurately when you are.
The two overlap. Pages that are fast, crawlable and clearly written still matter. What changes is how you judge success. In AEO you're making sure a set of facts about your company is so consistent that any engine, reading any of your pages or anyone else's, comes away with the same accurate picture.
Why does it matter more in B2B technology?
Enterprise technology categories are crowded and hard to explain. Buyers ask comparative, situational questions: which observability platforms suit a hybrid estate, what separates two data platforms for a regulated bank, who supports data residency in Australia. AI assistants handle exactly those questions well, so that's increasingly where a long list starts.
If your facts are vague or scattered, the engine fills the gap with whatever it can find, whether that's an old review, a competitor's comparison page or a forum thread from three product versions ago. You rarely see it happen. You simply notice that prospects turn up with the wrong idea of what you do.
How do answer engines decide what to quote?
Each engine works differently and none publishes its full method. Still, the pages that get retrieved and cited tend to have five things in common.
- An engine can reach the page. It's server-rendered, loads quickly and isn't blocked in robots.txt for the crawlers you care about, and the answer sits in the HTML itself, where a form, a PDF or a script can't hide it.
- A single passage can be quoted on its own. It answers the question directly and names the company, so it still makes sense when it's lifted out of the page.
- Other sites say the same thing. Directories, review platforms, community discussions, partner pages, analyst notes and the press carry matching facts, and engines give weight to that agreement.
- The markup tells the engine what the page is about. schema.org structured data names the organisation, product, question and answer, and links them with stable identifiers.
- The dates are real and the facts are current. Pages show accurate published and updated dates, and nothing on them describes a product you've since changed.
How we run AEO work with clients
We work in this order, and it's the same whether we're doing it for you or your team is doing it in-house.
- Collect the real questions. Pull them from sales call notes, RFPs, support tickets, community threads and the questions prospects ask in a first meeting. Write them down in the buyer's words.
- Settle your canonical facts. Agree one spelling of the company name, one description, your headquarters, categories, products, deployment options and pricing model. Keep them in a single source that everyone who publishes about you can copy from.
- Write answer-first passages. For each important question, lead with a direct answer of roughly 40 to 70 words that names your company and stands on its own, and put the supporting detail underneath.
- Mark it up. Publish Organization, Product or SoftwareApplication, Article and FAQPage structured data, with sameAs links to your official profiles. Never mark up ratings you don't have.
- Earn corroboration. Make sure independent sites carry the same facts. Keep directory profiles current, answer questions in communities with your affiliation disclosed, and respond to reviews.
- Make it machine-readable. Allow reputable AI crawlers, keep key pages server-rendered, and consider an llms.txt file that points models to your most important pages.
- Measure a fixed prompt set. Track the same buyer questions over time across the engines that matter to you, and record whether you're cited, how you're described and who else appears.
What should you stop doing?
- Stop gating the content that explains what you do, because an engine can't read a PDF behind a form.
- Stop leaning on superlatives such as "leading" and "next-generation". They give an engine nothing to quote and a buyer nothing to believe.
- Stop letting product names, company names and descriptions drift between your website, LinkedIn, directories and partner pages.
- Stop publishing thin pages for every keyword variant, since they dilute the one clear page you want quoted.
Do independent directories count?
They do. Independent directories are one of the places engines look for corroboration. Techarda, for example, lists technology companies with an answer summary, an FAQ, solutions and structured data, and exposes the same facts through its public agent API and its llms.txt file. Techarda doesn't sell placement, so the only way to be represented well there is to keep your facts complete and accurate. If you're listed, claim your profile and check it. Our answer-ready profile checklist covers what to fill in first.
What results can you honestly expect?
Nobody can guarantee a citation, and you should be wary of anyone who says they can. Engines retrain and re-crawl on their own schedules, answers vary from one session to the next, and the same prompt can produce different sources on different days. Treat AEO as ongoing hygiene that never really finishes. Review your canonical facts every quarter, re-run your prompt set and fix the places where engines describe you wrongly.
If you'd like us to run a prompt audit and a facts review for your company, talk to us.