They're not searching for a website or brand.
They're looking for an answer.
Where they once searched Google about a broad category, your customers are increasingly asking AI specific question. Answer Engine Optimisation helps make your business expertise visible and your knowledge useful for AI systems to confidently cite you its answers
Sensai helps New Zealand businesses adapt to this new paradigm.
What is Answer Engine Optimisation?
Answer Engine Optimisation, or AEO, is the process of improving the information available about your business so AI-powered search and answer systems can understand what you do, identify when you are relevant, and use reliable information about you when responding to users.
It builds on established SEO principles including crawlability, authority and useful content. But the objective is broader than ranking a webpage. AEO considers how your business is represented when an AI system combines information from multiple sources into an answer.
Read the full AEO thesis →Be understood. Be trusted. Be useful.
Make your business clear
AI cannot confidently recommend something it cannot clearly identify. Your website should make the fundamentals explicit: what you do, who you serve, where you operate, what makes your offering different and when someone should choose you.
Give answers something to stand on
Experience, credentials, customer feedback, independent mentions, original research, case studies and detailed service information help establish whether information about your business deserves confidence.
Answer the questions people actually ask
Generic marketing copy tells people how great a business is. Useful content helps them make a decision. Pricing, comparisons, suitability, limitations, processes and real customer questions create the substance both humans and AI can work with.
AEO doesn't replace SEO. It changes what success looks like.
SEO remains fundamental. A website still needs to be crawlable, indexable, useful, authoritative and technically sound.
But the customer journey is changing. Traditional search commonly looked like a query, a list of results, then a click through to a website. AI-assisted discovery can now research, compare and summarise information before the customer ever decides whether to visit a site.
- → Search: Query → Results → Click → Website
- → Answers: Question → AI response → Sources or recommendations
- → Agents: Intent → Research → Selection → Action
When AI explains your market, does it understand where you fit?
The website is still important. It just no longer controls the entire conversation. AEO focuses on improving the information and signals AI systems have available when deciding how to describe, compare or recommend your business.
AEO or GEO?
At a practical level, very little separates them. AEO means Answer Engine Optimisation. GEO means Generative Engine Optimisation. Both describe improving visibility within AI-generated search and answer experiences.
AEO tends to focus on making information clear and useful enough to answer questions. GEO tends to focus on increasing the likelihood that generative systems retrieve, trust, mention or cite it. In reality, one depends on the other.
Sensai uses both terms because people search for both. We prefer AEO because ultimately the customer asked a question and somebody has to provide the answer.
Mystery solved. You may now safely stop worrying about the acronym.
What does AEO actually involve?
There is no single switch that turns on AI visibility. It is the combined result of several things being done well.
Technical accessibility
Search and AI systems cannot reliably use information they cannot reach. We check crawling, indexing, robots directives, rendering, site structure, canonicalisation and other technical barriers.
Business clarity
Who are you? What do you sell? Where? To whom? Why are you relevant? Important services, locations, expertise and relationships need to be obvious to both humans and machines.
Question coverage
Most websites are organised around what the business wants to say. Customers organise their thinking around what they want to know. We identify the questions that influence discovery and buying decisions.
Original expertise
Generic information is easy to generate. Your experience, customer conversations, proprietary data, opinions, case studies and hard-earned knowledge are much harder to replace.
Authority and corroboration
Independent coverage, reviews, professional profiles, directories, partnerships and other trusted sources can help establish who your business is and why its information should be taken seriously.
Measurement and improvement
We test representative customer questions, identify where your business is missing or misunderstood, compare competitors, improve the underlying source material and test again.
There is no secret "optimise for AI" button.
AEO is new enough to have accumulated plenty of magic tricks. Be suspicious of anyone promising AI visibility through shortcuts alone.
- → Stuffing pages with supposed AI keywords
- → Publishing hundreds of generic AI-written articles
- → Adding magical "AI schema"
- → Chopping every paragraph into artificial LLM-friendly chunks
- → Publishing an llms.txt file and calling the job finished
- → Guaranteeing that ChatGPT or Google will recommend you
Improve the information, not the gimmicks.
Clear headings, structured data, useful answers and technically sound websites all have legitimate purposes. We use them because they improve the quality and accessibility of your information, not because somebody told us they contain magic AI dust.
Your customers are already telling you what content to create.
One of the best sources of useful business content rarely appears in the marketing plan. It's the questions customers ask every day.
Those questions appear in chatbot conversations, sales calls, support tickets, email enquiries, consultations, live chat and conversations with staff.
Sensai calls the structured collection of these questions and approved answers a Response Library.
Instead of continually inventing topics for the next generic article, the business builds a growing source of real questions and real expertise.
That knowledge can support your website, chatbot, content programme, internal AI systems and eventually autonomous agents acting on behalf of customers.
The objective is not more content. It's better source material.
How do you measure AEO?
There is no universal "AI ranking" equivalent to a traditional Google position. AI responses are dynamic, questions vary and different platforms may produce different answers.
Are you appearing?
How often your business appears across a defined set of relevant customer questions.
Who appears instead?
How often your business is mentioned compared with competitors across the same question set.
Is AI getting you right?
When your business is mentioned, we check whether the description, services, positioning and important details are actually correct.
What is influencing the answer?
Where visible, citations and source links help identify which websites and pages are informing relevant AI responses.
Are people clicking?
Where referral data is available, we can measure visits arriving from AI-powered search and answer platforms.
Does it matter?
Visibility is only useful if it helps the right customers discover, trust and ultimately choose the business.
Third-party AEO monitoring tools are useful, but their prompt tests are samples rather than a complete record of every AI conversation taking place. A dashboard can measure the test. It should never be mistaken for the entire market.
Improve the source. Then improve the signal.
AEO is not a one-off technical installation. We treat it as a continuous improvement process.
Measure what AI currently understands, improve the underlying information, then test again.
Discover
See what AI currently knows, mentions and gets wrong.
Structure
Make your business, services, expertise and important information clearer.
Plan
Identify the questions, content gaps and visibility opportunities that matter.
Implement
Improve pages, content, technical accessibility and supporting signals.
Report
Measure visibility, accuracy, competitors and meaningful changes.
Improve
Use what we learn to decide what should change next.
Common AEO questions
Is AEO replacing SEO?
No. Good SEO remains an important foundation for visibility in AI-powered search. AEO adds a broader focus on how business information is understood, represented and used within AI-generated answers across different platforms.
What's the difference between AEO and GEO?
Mostly terminology. AEO means Answer Engine Optimisation and GEO means Generative Engine Optimisation. Both describe work intended to improve visibility within AI-generated discovery experiences. Sensai primarily uses AEO, but we don't recommend losing sleep over the acronym.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my business?
No. Neither Sensai nor any other agency controls the output of independent AI systems. We can improve the clarity, accessibility, quality and supporting evidence around your business, then measure whether its representation improves over time. Anyone guaranteeing a specific recommendation should also be able to sell you tomorrow's Lotto numbers.
Does schema markup improve AI visibility?
Structured data can make explicit information about a webpage and its entities easier for machines to interpret, and it remains useful for established search features. It is not a special AEO switch. We use schema where it has a legitimate purpose, not because adding more JSON-LD automatically creates AI citations.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
Not as a universal requirement. Different platforms may adopt different standards over time, but publishing an llms.txt file by itself does not constitute an AEO strategy. We prioritise techniques with demonstrated value rather than treating every new theory as mandatory.
Can AI-generated content hurt AEO?
Using AI to help create content is not inherently the problem. Publishing large amounts of generic, derivative or low-value material is. The important question is whether the finished content contains genuine expertise, useful knowledge and something worth finding.
How long does AEO take?
There is no universal timeframe. Technical issues can sometimes be corrected quickly, while building stronger content coverage, authority and measurable visibility is an ongoing process. The best starting point is establishing what AI currently knows about the business and identifying the gaps.
Where should I start?
Establish a baseline. Test the questions your customers are likely to ask, see which businesses AI currently mentions, identify visible sources and check whether your own information is clear, accurate and accessible. That gives you something concrete to improve.
Find out what AI already knows about your business.
Before changing your website, see where you actually stand. Our AEO Insights Audit tests relevant customer questions, identifies competitors appearing in AI responses and highlights opportunities to improve how your business is represented.
You will get a practical baseline of your current AI visibility and a clearer idea of what should be improved first.