Be the source answer engines cite, not the link they skip
Answer engine optimization gets your brand quoted inside Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot, where a direct answer now replaces the ten blue links. I measure whether these engines retrieve and cite you, then fix what is stopping them.
The problem
Answer engines do not rank ten links. They give one answer, and either you are a cited source in it or you are invisible.
Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Copilot read the web, pick a small set of sources they trust, and synthesise a direct answer. If your pages are hard to retrieve or easy to doubt, the engine quotes someone else and your click never happens.
- Your pages rank in Google but never appear as a cited source in AI Overviews.
- Perplexity answers questions in your category and names competitors, not you.
- AI-referred traffic is rising for your competitors and flat for you.
Fit
This is built for you if
Head of Marketing
Ranking in Google, absent from AI answers
“We rank, but we are not being cited.”
Founder or CEO
Category buyers ask assistants first
“Buyers tell us they found a competitor through ChatGPT.”
SEO or content lead
Strong content, weak AI citation
“Our best content is not being picked up by the answer engines.”
This is probably not a fit if
- Sites with too few indexed pages for an engine to have a source worth choosing.
- Teams wanting a full done-for-you rebuild rather than the strategy and optimization plan. Heavy implementation runs through theCSS Agency.
- Anyone expecting a guarantee of citation. No one can promise what a model quotes.
Deliverables
What is included
- A citation baseline across Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Copilot, and ChatGPT search on your buyer-intent queries
- Retrievability check: what is blocking answer engines from reading and extracting your pages
- Source-trust analysis: why the engine trusts the pages it cites instead of yours
- Content and structure fixes that make your pages quotable, prioritised by impact
- A prioritised action plan you can run in-house or hand to a delivery team
Process
How it runs
- 01
Baseline
Days 1-3
Capture how the answer engines cite you today across a fixed query set.
- 02
Diagnosis
Days 4-7
Find the retrieval, structure, and trust gaps costing you citations.
- 03
Plan
Days 8-10
A prioritised plan, and a walkthrough of what to fix first.
Investment
Timeline and investment
Answer engine optimization is scoped to your site and the gaps found, with the AI Visibility Audit as the fixed-fee starting point.
What changes the price: the size of your site, how many markets and languages you run, and how deep the retrieval and trust gaps go once they are measured.
The audit is the entry point because it turns a vague sense that you are not cited into a specific, prioritised list. Ongoing optimization is scoped from there, either directly or, where the fixes are a heavy technical build, through theCSS Agency.
FAQ
Before you ask
- What is the difference between AEO and traditional SEO?
- Traditional SEO earns a ranked position in a list of links. Answer engine optimization earns a citation inside the single synthesised answer that now sits above that list. You can rank well and still never be cited.
- Is answer engine optimization the same as generative engine optimization?
- They overlap but are not identical. Answer engine optimization is about being retrieved and cited by engines that quote sources, like Perplexity and AI Overviews. Generative engine optimization is about how a model represents and recommends you when it composes an answer, often without citing anyone.
- Which answer engines do you cover?
- Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, and ChatGPT search, on a query set built from how your buyers actually ask.
- Can you guarantee we will be cited?
- No, and anyone who does is guessing. What I can do is remove the specific reasons an engine is not citing you today, and measure the change against a captured baseline.
- Do you implement the fixes, or just diagnose?
- The work is measurement, diagnosis, and the optimization plan. Where a fix is a heavy technical build, that runs through theCSS Agency, so you always know which hat I am wearing.
Find out if answer engines cite you
Start with a measured read of where you stand across Perplexity, AI Overviews, and Copilot, and what it takes to earn the citation. You get the findings whether or not we work together after it.