People are asking assistants instead of searching
A growing share of the question “who should I hire for this” now gets asked to ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, or Claude — and answered without the person ever seeing a list of ten blue links. When that happens, being ranked fourth is worth nothing. Either you are in the answer or you are not.
These systems do not pick names at random. They pull from sources they can parse and have some reason to trust. Answer Engine Optimization is the work of making your business one of them.
What the work involves
- An audit of where you currently stand across the major assistants — including what they say about you now, which is frequently not what you would want, and sometimes just wrong.
- Content structured for extraction. Direct answers to real questions, in the shape these systems can lift cleanly, rather than buried three paragraphs into a page.
- Schema markup — FAQPage, HowTo, Service, and a properly formed business entity — so a machine can tell what you do, where, and for whom without inferring it.
- Crawler access configured deliberately for GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest. Plenty of sites block these by accident and never find out.
- llms.txt and llms-full.txt, the emerging convention for handing assistants a clean summary of your site instead of making them guess.
- Ongoing monitoring, because the answers change as the models do.
An honest assessment of where this stands
This is a genuinely new discipline and anyone claiming a decade of expertise in it is inventing a résumé. Nobody can guarantee a citation in ChatGPT, and we will not pretend otherwise. What can be said with confidence is that the underlying work — clear structure, real schema, direct answers, accessible content — is the same work that has always made sites legible to search engines. It pays off in conventional rankings whether or not the AI bet lands.
We practise this on our own site: llms.txt and llms-full.txt are live, and you can read the reasoning in our write-up on llms.txt and how AEO differs from SEO. If you want to know what assistants currently say about your business, start with how to check whether ChatGPT recommends you.