Ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overview, Perplexity or Claude who to hire and the answer names specific businesses. Answer engine optimization is the work of getting your name into those answers.
Answer engine optimization is the work of getting your business named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of searching. It covers whether AI crawlers can read your site, whether your business facts are machine readable, and whether your pages answer questions in text an engine can quote.
LocalCraft Digital works out of Edwardsville, Illinois, and builds this into the site itself. No separate retainer. See what comes standard or what it costs.
SEO fights for a slot in a list of blue links. AEO and GEO fight to be inside the answer, where no list exists. The two acronyms describe one job: be readable by AI crawlers, be unambiguous about who you are, and answer the question in the first paragraph.
Generative engine optimization is the same discipline under a newer name, and some agencies sell AEO, GEO and LLMO as three services on three pages. We fetched those pages on August 21, 2026. One firm's three versions run 4,692 lines each and differ by eight of them. Meanwhile the agency holding first place for answer engine optimization services, aeo services and answer engine optimization agency wins all three from a single page. We treat it as one discipline on one page, and put the hours into the work.
In the order an engine works through them. Every LocalCraft build ships with all seven, and we can check any site against them.
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and OAI-SearchBot each read the web separately from Googlebot, and Google-Extended decides whether what Googlebot already took can be used to train Gemini. A robots.txt that blocks them, or a site that ships an empty shell and paints the content in with JavaScript, leaves them nothing to quote. This is the first thing we check and the fastest thing to fix.
Schema.org markup states your business type, address, phone and service area as data rather than as sentences an engine has to interpret. Without it, an AI assistant is guessing what you sell from your headline copy, and a headline like Quality You Can Trust tells it nothing.
An engine assembles its answer out of pages that answer the question being asked. A page headed Our Services gives an engine nothing to lift. A page headed How much does a new roof cost in Edwardsville, followed by a real range, gives it a paragraph it can quote and attribute to you.
An answer capsule is a single paragraph of about 40 to 60 words that fully answers one question before the page elaborates. It is the unit an engine lifts. An engine skips long preambles and answers spread over several paragraphs, because there is no clean span to take.
A phone number rendered as an image, or an address that only exists in the footer of a page nobody links to, cannot be resolved into a business entity. Tap-to-call links and a consistent address across your site, Google Business Profile and directory listings are what tie the facts together.
llms.txt is a plain text summary of your business and services, saved at the root of your domain and written for language models to read. The standard is young and adoption is uneven. Every LocalCraft build ships one, at a cost of twenty minutes.
We report on the answers themselves. Four engines, once a month, asked the same question your customers ask, and we record which businesses each one names, month over month. Rankings go in the same report, underneath.
In August 2026 we captured live results for the top searches in this market and read the pages holding first place for them. Neither of the category's two most common sales claims matched what we found.
The page holding first place for answer engine optimization services, and cited in Google's own AI Overview for it, is marceldigital.com/services/answer-engine-optimization. We fetched it on August 21, 2026: 349KB of HTML and not one line of structured data. The pages getting quoted share open, readable text.
In our own local results, three sites cited by Google's AI answer return a 404 on theirs. Not one citation we captured traced back to the file. We ship one on every build anyway.
Every month we ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the question your customers ask, record whether your business was named, and record which competitors were named instead. We also track whether Google's AI Overview cites your site on each of your tracked searches, and how many times AI crawlers read your pages.
That goes in your monthly report alongside calls and form fills. When a competitor enters an answer you were in, or you enter one you were not, it shows up as a change you can see. In the August 2026 baseline one client came back cited by three of the four engines and named outright in one of the answers. We can show you those answers.
“He handled everything on the design and layout improvements AND helped me to get clients who search using AI platforms.”
Answer engine optimization is the work of getting your business named and cited when someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of searching. It covers whether AI crawlers can read your site, whether your business facts are machine readable, and whether your pages answer questions in text an engine can quote.
SEO competes for a position in a list of blue links. AEO and GEO compete to be inside the answer itself, where there is no list. Most people use AEO and GEO interchangeably. The work is the same either way: be readable by AI crawlers, be unambiguous about who you are, and answer questions directly.
The flat $7,997 build covers it, and you own the site outright. Most agencies bill AEO as its own monthly retainer stacked on top of whatever they charged you to build. The Craft Plan is $3,997 to start plus $497 a month, which runs the AEO, SEO, GEO and performance work every month and includes unlimited content updates.
Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who they recommend for what you sell in your town, and see whether you are named. Then check the mechanical side: whether your robots.txt allows GPTBot and ClaudeBot, whether your homepage carries business schema, and whether any page answers a real customer question in plain text.
It helps and costs nothing, but it does not decide the outcome. We measured pages that rank first and get cited while serving no structured data at all, alongside pages with valid FAQ markup whose answers sit collapsed behind accordions and go uncited. The pages that get quoted share one trait: text a reader can see.
Crawler access and schema changes get picked up in days to weeks. Being named in answers takes longer, because it depends on what else exists about you online. Plan on a few months. Where a category has few competitors doing this work, the climb is shorter, and that describes a good deal of what we see locally.
Not always. If your site is server rendered, loads fast and has a page per service, the work is schema, crawler access and rewriting pages to answer questions. If it is a page builder that ships an empty shell to crawlers, a rebuild usually costs less than fighting the platform.
Answer engine optimization sits on top of the same foundation as local SEO in the Metro East, and for a business here the two run together: AI search in St. Louis and the Metro East covers what changes when the question has a town in it. If you are starting from nothing, how a build works is the place to begin.