Something quietly broke in the deal your business made with Google. For twenty years the arrangement was simple: publish something useful, rank for it, and receive a click. In 2026 Google increasingly writes the answer itself, at the top of the page, drawing on sources it selects. The person reads it and moves on. The click never arrives.
This is the problem an AEO agency exists to solve. Not to win you a position in a list, but to make your business the source that gets quoted when the answer is written. It is a genuinely different discipline to SEO, and it is worth understanding properly before you pay anyone to do it.
What an AEO agency actually does
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. An answer engine is any system that responds to a question with a synthesised answer instead of a list of links: Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, and the AI assistants now built into browsers.
An AEO agency works to make your business the thing those systems reach for. In practice that means four kinds of work, and only the first resembles conventional SEO.
- Answer-first content. Restructuring pages so the direct answer to a real question appears in the first two sentences, in plain language a model can lift cleanly, rather than buried after four paragraphs of preamble.
- Entity clarity. Making it unambiguous to a machine who you are, where you operate, and what you do. This includes structured data, but it mostly means being described identically everywhere you appear.
- Corroboration. Answer engines prefer claims that more than one independent source supports. Getting mentioned, reviewed and cited elsewhere matters more for AEO than it ever did for rankings.
- Measurement that fits. Because there is no position to track, someone has to actually prompt the answer engines on a fixed set of questions and record whether you were named.
Why this became urgent in 2026
At Google I/O in May 2026 the company set out what it called a new era for AI search, extending AI Mode and folding generative answers deeper into the default experience (blog.google). Industry reporting through 2026 has consistently found AI Overviews appearing on a majority of searches, with a steep fall in click-through rates on the results beneath them.
There is a counter-current worth knowing about. In May 2026 Google said it would put more links to websites back inside AI Overviews (Ars Technica). That is good news, and it sharpens the point rather than softening it. If the answer carries citations, then being one of the cited sources is the whole game.
Here is the shape of the problem in real numbers. On our own site, non-branded search produced 41,523 impressions and six clicks in a recent 28 day window, at an average position of 62. Impressions are no longer a measure of visibility. Being seen is.
AEO and SEO are not the same thing
The two overlap enough that plenty of agencies have simply relabelled their SEO offer. They are related but not identical, and the difference matters when you are deciding what to buy.
| Question | SEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|
| What wins | A ranking position | A citation inside the answer |
| Success looks like | A click | Being named, often with no click |
| Content shape | Comprehensive, keyword-led | Answer first, then the detail |
| Measured by | Rankings, clicks, impressions | Citation rate, branded search, AI referrals |
| Biggest lever | Links and relevance | Entity clarity and corroboration |
One thing that has not changed: AEO sits on top of SEO, not instead of it. A page that cannot be crawled, is slow, or contradicts itself will not be cited either. If your technical foundations are weak, fix those first. Our guide on ranking in Google AI Overviews covers the tactical layer in more depth.
Do you actually need an AEO agency?
Often, no. We would rather tell you that plainly than sell you a retainer you do not need. If you run a small site in a clear niche, and you or someone on your team can write honestly and well about the questions your customers ask, you can capture a great deal of AEO value yourself. Answer the question in the first two sentences. Say who you are consistently. Publish things worth quoting.
An agency earns its keep in narrower circumstances:
- Your category is already dominated by AI answers and you appear in none of them.
- You have hundreds of pages and no consistent entity story across them.
- Structured data, schema and technical implementation are beyond your team.
- Your organic traffic has fallen while your impressions have risen, which is the signature of being read but not clicked.
How to choose one without getting burned
AEO is new enough that the market has not sorted itself out. Some good questions to ask, and the answers that should worry you.
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1
How will you measure whether this worked?
A good answer describes prompting a fixed set of questions across several answer engines on a schedule and tracking citation rate. A bad answer talks about rankings, because rankings do not exist inside an AI answer.
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2
Can you guarantee we get cited by ChatGPT?
Nobody can. If they say yes, leave. Retrieval and training are controlled by the model providers and change without notice.
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3
What is the SEO baseline before we start?
Any agency that will not audit crawlability, speed and structured data before selling you AEO is selling you a coat of paint.
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4
How long before we see anything?
Honest answer: a couple of months for the first signals, two to three quarters for anything meaningful. Faster promises are marketing.
What AEO costs in Australia
There is no honest rate card, and you should treat one as a red flag. Scope drives everything. An audit of how you currently appear across the major answer engines is a small, fixed piece of work with a clear deliverable, and it is the sensible first purchase because it tells you whether you have a problem at all.
Ongoing work is normally a monthly retainer, and in most cases it belongs inside your SEO engagement rather than beside it as a separate line item. Paying two agencies to argue about the same pages is a good way to spend money and change nothing.
Where we fit
Vikilinks is an Australian AI-focused agency, and answer engine optimisation is the core of what we do rather than a bolt-on. Our AEO services start with an audit of how you appear in AI answers today, because there is no point building a strategy on a guess. If you would rather see the state of play first, our study of AI search visibility in Australia tested 42 Australian small businesses and found two in three were not ready.
In short
What is an AEO agency?
Key takeaways
- AEO stands for answer engine optimisation: being cited inside an AI answer rather than ranked in a list of links.
- It sits on top of SEO rather than replacing it. Weak technical foundations mean no citations either.
- The work is answer-first content, entity clarity and structured data, corroboration elsewhere, and citation-based measurement.
- Plenty of small businesses can do the basics themselves. Agencies earn their fee on scale, technical depth and competitive categories.
- Nobody can guarantee a ChatGPT citation. Treat any such promise, or a fixed price quoted before an audit, as a red flag.