What is AEO? A guide to answer engine optimisation.

How engines decide who to name

What our scans record. Nobody outside these companies can see the mechanism itself.

We cannot see inside an engine. What we can see is the set of pages an answer was assembled from, because every scan records them beside the answer. Read enough of those and the pattern is hard to miss: the answer repeats a ranked list from a page the engine treats as a source, and the brand near the top of that list is usually the brand the answer names.

Topical fit appears to count for more than size. The pages behind an answer are more often narrow trade titles than the biggest domains in a sector. Age shows too: citation drifts down as an article gets older and newer pages replace it, which is why the work is a replacement cycle, not a one-off.

Can it be engineered on purpose?

Yes, and the mechanism is specific enough to write down. Identify the pages an engine already reads for a category - which is what the free scan does (the LLM visibility checker runs it on your domain) - then secure placements on them, with the brand where the ranked list gets quoted from. Then structure your own pages so a reader arriving from the answer finds the same story.

The on-site half you can do yourself. The part that needs a specialist is finding the right publications and getting into them on merit rather than buying a slot.

How long it takes

Three clocks, so we do not quote one number.

The caveat is durability. Positions inside an answer shift as engines change what they read. Holding a citation needs monitoring and fresh placements, which is why this runs as a retainer.