What does an AEO agency do?
An AEO agency makes your company easy for answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to find, understand and cite when buyers ask about your category. In practice that work splits three ways: the website, the content on it, and mentions of you elsewhere on the web. Many AEO services focus on tracking dashboards and content volume. We focus on the website, because it's the foundation the other two depend on.
If you're new to the terms, our plain-English definition of what AEO is is a good start, and SEO vs AEO vs GEO explains how much actually differs.
What's included in an AEO-ready website build?
An AEO-ready website build covers the copy, structure and code that decide whether an AI system can use your pages. We deliver it as our standard website package, at $8,000 for up to six pages plus $500 for each extra page.
Deliverable | What we do | Why answer engines care |
|---|---|---|
Answer-first copy | Each section opens with a direct, standalone answer | Extractable sentences are what gets quoted |
Money pages | Homepage, pricing, product, comparison and use-case pages | These pages carry most AI-attributed leads |
Server rendering | Content in the HTML, built in Next.js | Many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript |
Crawler access | robots rules that allow OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot | Blocked pages can't be cited |
Real HTML tables | Pricing, comparisons and specs as text, never images | Tables are easy to parse and quote |
Schema hygiene | Organization with sameAs, Article, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage | Clear entity data, not a ranking trick |
Visible FAQ and dates | Real buyer questions and an updated date | Freshness and direct answers |
Measurement | A GA4 channel group for AI referrals | So you can see what's working |
Why do money pages matter more than blog posts for AI search?
Because that's where AI-driven buyers land and convert. TripleDart's study of 28 B2B SaaS companies in early 2026 found homepages earned 31.9% of LLM citations and 81.7% of AI-attributed leads, while general blog posts drew traffic but no leads. Pricing comparisons and long-form deep dives were the blog formats that converted.
Clicks are also getting scarcer. Ahrefs found the top organic result's click-through rate is 58% lower when an AI Overview appears. Fewer visitors arrive, and the ones who do have often already read a summary of you. That raises the bar for the pages they land on: they have to confirm the answer quickly and make the next step obvious. It's why we write the money pages before anyone talks about a blog calendar, and why formats like comparison pages and cost tables get extra care.
Which AEO tactics don't work?
Several popular AEO tactics have little evidence behind them, and we won't sell them as the answer. Google's own AI features documentation says optimizing for AI features is the same as SEO, and Google's 2026 guidance calls llms.txt files, content chunking and AI-specific markup unnecessary.
- llms.txt as a fix. Ahrefs found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests. We can add one as cheap hygiene, for example with our llms.txt generator, but it won't earn citations by itself.
- Schema as a ranking hack. Ahrefs' controlled 2026 schema test found no lift in AI citations. We add schema for clean entity data and rich results, not as a citation lever.
- Chopping pages into fragments. Google advises against it. Self-contained sections of a few paragraphs work better than tiny chunks.
- Self-promotional best-of lists. Peec's analysis of 232,000 citations found they made up only about 4% of ChatGPT citations.
Our longer list of AEO myths covers more of what doesn't move citations.
What drives AI citations beyond your website?
Mentions of your brand across the web matter more than backlinks. In Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, web mentions correlated 0.664 with AI Overview visibility, against 0.218 for backlinks. Reviews, community discussions, podcasts and press coverage all feed what answer engines believe about you.
We're a website studio, not a PR firm, so we don't run outreach campaigns. What we do is make sure your name, category and claims are consistent everywhere you control them, and build the pages worth citing when mentions arrive. Engines also behave differently: Semrush's AI Visibility Index found ChatGPT cites about 15 sources per answer against about 3 for Gemini. Our guide to brand mentions and AI visibility covers the off-site side.
How do we build an AEO website?
Free intro call
Thirty minutes on your category, your buyers, the questions they ask AI tools and what your site says today.
Prompt audit
We run 20 to 30 real buyer prompts through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and record who gets cited and what's said about you.
Entity and message
We settle exactly how to describe your company, category and product, and use it consistently across every page.
Answer-first copy
We write the money pages so each section opens with a direct answer to a question buyers actually ask.
Design
Pages designed in Figma for people first: scannable, with tables, FAQs and proof placed where they help.
Next.js build
Server-rendered pages with clean HTML, crawler access, schema, sitemaps and a CMS your team can update.
Launch and measure
We set up AI referral tracking in GA4 and hand you the prompt list to re-run each month.
How do you measure AEO results?
You measure AEO with three signals together: AI referral traffic, what buyers tell you, and a regular prompt audit. No single tool sees all of it yet. We set up a GA4 channel group that groups visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, claude.ai, Gemini and Copilot, add a question about how people heard of you to your forms, and give you the buyer prompts to re-check monthly.
Want a baseline first? Our free AEO score checker is a 20-point self-assessment, and tracking AI traffic in GA4 walks through the setup.
Who is this AEO service for, and which sites have we built?
It suits B2B startups whose buyers research in AI tools before they ever fill in a form, and whose current site is thin, built mostly in client-side JavaScript or hard to quote. It's not a fit if you only want monthly AEO reports or content volume on a site you're happy with. A content or SEO retainer will serve you better there.
For Lakehouse Partners, we designed and built a multi-page website that turns complex Data and AI services into a clear, credible journey for buyers. For Minexa.ai, we designed and developed a product-led website that made an AI web-data platform clear to users and developers, and for Update.ai we handled website strategy and product storytelling. Moving from another platform? Migration work is scoped on the intro call, and we include redirects and SEO checks in any migration we take on. Our Next.js development page explains the build side.
