Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO): A Practical Guide for UK Businesses
How to get your business cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. What AEO is, how it differs from SEO, and the concrete steps that work for UK and London companies.
By Zynoff.ai Editorial, Senior engineering and growth team
Key takeaways
- AEO is about being the cited source in AI-generated answers, not just ranking a blue link.
- AI assistants favour pages with clear, direct answers, strong entity signals and structured data.
- Local and sector specificity, such as 'in London' or 'for FCA-regulated firms', makes you the better citation.
- Good AEO is built on good technical SEO. You cannot skip the fundamentals.
What is answer engine optimisation?
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content, markup and entity signals so AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini, and features such as Google AI Overviews, cite your business as the answer to a question. Where SEO competes for a position on a results page, AEO competes to be the source an AI summarises and links.
How AI assistants choose what to cite
Assistants retrieve candidate pages, then prefer those that answer the question directly, early and unambiguously, that are consistent with other trusted sources, and that carry clear signals about who the business is, where it operates and what it does. Structured data, consistent business information and plain-language definitions all help.
- Direct answers in the first 40 to 60 words under a question-form heading
- Entity consistency: the same name, address, services and claims everywhere
- Schema.org markup for Organisation, Service, FAQ and Article
- Specific, verifiable claims rather than vague marketing language
AEO for UK and London businesses
Assistants answer location-specific questions constantly: 'best software developers in London', 'SEO agency for a clinic in Harley Street'. Pages that explicitly address a location and a sector, with real detail rather than a city name swapped into a template, become the natural citation.
Use UK spelling, UK regulations and UK examples. An assistant answering a UK question will prefer sources that are obviously UK-based.
A practical AEO checklist
Work through these in order. Most businesses find the first three deliver the bulk of the gain.
- Fix technical SEO: crawlability, Core Web Vitals, canonical tags and indexation
- Add question-form headings with concise, direct answers on every key page
- Implement Organisation, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList schema
- Publish an llms.txt file and keep business information consistent across the web
- Create location and sector pages with genuinely specific content
- Measure: track which assistants cite you and for which questions