Answer engine optimization
When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity what to buy, a handful of brands get named. We make sure yours is one of them, and we measure whether it worked.
The problem
Ask an assistant which brand to buy in your category and you will get a short list. Ask it today, because almost nobody has.
The answer is often wrong, out of date, or simply missing. A competitor with a worse product gets recommended because their answer was easier to find, their facts were consistent, and the sources the engine trusts already mentioned them. None of that is luck, and none of it is traditional SEO.
What we do
Answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO) and AI search optimization are three names for the same discipline. This is the work underneath the acronyms.
A fixed set of the buying questions in your category, asked across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. What the assistants say about you today, who they name instead, and which sources they cite to do it. You cannot improve a number nobody has measured.
Product and brand content rewritten to answer the questions buyers actually ask, in the order they ask them, with the schema markup and FAQ architecture that lets an engine lift the answer and attribute it. Written for a question, not for a category page.
Assistants verify before they recommend. Where your site, your marketplace listings, your retailer pages and your reviews disagree on price, pack, material or claim, the engine resolves the conflict by leaving you out. We reconcile them.
The sources answer engines draw from: reviews, comparisons, press, marketplace and retailer listings. These are the citations that decide whether a model treats your brand as a known quantity or an unknown one.
How it is measured
How often your brand appears when the buying questions in your category are asked, how it is described when it does, and which competitors are named instead.
Alongside that: which sources are being cited, so you know which assets are doing the work and which were wasted effort. And referral traffic and orders from AI surfaces, reported next to organic search rather than buried inside it.
We track it with Potcake by M38, our own AI visibility tracker. It asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI the buying questions in your category, shows which competitor gets named when you do not, and lists the fixes. Smaller businesses can run it themselves.
It compounds, and the assets are ones you own. That is the case for starting before your category does.
Who this is for
We are not an agency and not an advisory practice. An agency executes the scope you write. A consultant tells you what to do. We take the seat and own the result.
That means the answer layer is rarely the only thing we touch. It sits with the storefront, the marketplaces, the demand and the unit economics, because the content that makes you citable is the same content that converts, and the facts an engine verifies are the same facts your listings carry. Run it in isolation and you are optimizing a channel. Run it with the rest and you are running a business.
See how the answer layer fits the other four areas, read the guide to AEO and GEO, or look at how an engagement works.
Questions we get
As part of your team. We take the seat, make the calls and answer for the result, rather than executing a scope you have written. If you want a vendor to run a defined deliverable, an agency is cheaper and we will tell you so.
They are three names for the same discipline. AEO emphasizes the question and the answer, generative engine optimization emphasizes the technology producing it, and AI search optimization is the plainest description of all three. The work does not change with the label.
No. It builds on it. Crawlable pages, clear structure and real authority matter to both. The additions are question-first content, facts that stay consistent across every source an engine checks, and a measure of success that is citation rather than ranking.
The baseline is immediate: within the first two weeks you know what the assistants say about you today and who they recommend instead. Movement in share of answer follows the content and authority work, and it compounds rather than switching on.
Yes, as a Retainer. We will tell you on the first call if the problem you described is actually somewhere else, because it often is.
Send the store, the marketplace accounts and the ad accounts. In two weeks you get a real answer: what is broken, what it is costing you, and what is worth fixing first.
