We help B2B companies get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. Most of what's now sold as AEO is the old SEO playbook with a new acronym. We're not interested in selling that. We sell the work that actually moves citations.
Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of being cited by AI search engines including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot. The work spans technical SEO, editorial content with evidence, entity authority, and off-domain presence on the surfaces those engines retrieve from. It's the discipline that's always driven durable organic growth, applied to a new set of measurement surfaces. The unit of attention is the citation, not the click. The retrieval is probabilistic, not deterministic. That changes how you track. It doesn't change the underlying work.
We Are All Connected have been instrumental in making our growth aspirations a reality, by over-achieving targets and helping us move fast.
Three structural changes broke the 2019 search playbook in eighteen months. The work below is what replaces it.
58% When an AI Overview appears, organic CTR for the position-1 result drops by 58%.
8-12 Each user query gets decomposed into 8-12 sub-queries by AI Mode and ChatGPT.
4 4 retrieval surfaces now compete for citation: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, and Copilot.
For every buyer-intent topic you want to own, we run query fan-out analysis. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode decompose a single user query into 8-12 sub-queries. We map those sub-queries, score them for commercial intent, and define which passages need to exist to cover the fan-out.
We rewrite or replace content with the structural patterns retrieval systems actually use: direct answers near the top, citation density throughout, statistics where they support claims, evidence the reader can verify. The Aggarwal GEO paper (KDD 2024) tested nine content interventions on a 10,000-query benchmark. The methods that worked were citation density, quotation, statistics, and prose clarity. We build content around what the research actually validates.
We build an entity graph for your domain. Who the company is, what products exist, what categories they fit, which authors publish, which topics are authoritative. This gets wired into structured data so AI retrieval systems can identify you correctly.
The 5W Citation Source Audit (Q1 2026) found Reddit and Wikipedia together drive over 25% of ChatGPT citations. We work the sources that feed AI answers: Wikipedia where eligible, YouTube transcripts, Reddit where it earns its place, G2 reviews, industry association pieces, podcast appearances. Most agencies skip this work because it's slower and less visible. It's also the work that compounds.
We track citation share, week-over-week movement, entity consistency across pages, and commercial impact via assisted conversions. Sources: Ahrefs Brand Radar, Profound, and manual prompt testing for the engines; Search Console for AI Overview impressions; HubSpot for pipeline. Baseline within 30 days, monthly reports, quarterly re-baseline. These systems are non-deterministic, and we don't manufacture precision the data doesn't support.
AEO shares almost everything with classical SEO: technical foundations, content quality, entity authority, structured data, off-domain presence. What's different is the measurement surface and how retrieval works. That changes what you track and how you report. The underlying discipline is the same.
Most agencies selling AEO are selling SEO with a new acronym, or they're selling schema markup as the lever that gets you cited. Neither is the work. The work is evidence-rich content, entity depth, off-domain authority, and the technical foundations every retrieval system depends on.
Your content estate scored against 40+ passage-level heuristics. A query fan-out map for your top 20 buyer-intent topics. A rewrite backlog prioritised by commercial intent and implementation difficulty.
Passage-level rewrites on the pages that matter. Structured data across product, service, article, FAQ, and HowTo schemas. A documented entity graph for your domain that we maintain alongside your team, not something shipped and forgotten.
Citation position reports across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Microsoft Copilot. Week-by-week movement that traditional rank tracking misses. Direct access to the senior team running the work, no account managers.
If you see yourself in the "not a fit" list, we appreciate the honesty. We're usually happy to recommend agencies who specialise in what you actually need.
PEI Group operates a network of 18 financial-media websites with more than 500,000 articles across the estate. We've run the SEO and content architecture for twelve years. When AI search started citing passages in 2024, the entity structure, canonical architecture, and passage-level formatting we'd already built were doing the work that makes content citable. That structure also proved protective through the 2025 index volatility: PEI's entity-rich sites lost 8-18% of indexed pages, against 53% for sites without it.
A four-stage diagnostic. Eligibility: can AI bots crawl, index, and retrieve your pages. Exposure: does your brand show up across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, and Google AI Mode, with a citation-share baseline. Engagement: are those citations driving clicks. Outcome: is any of it moving pipeline. You get query fan-out maps for your top 10 topics, a prioritised rewrite backlog, entity recommendations, and a 60-minute walkthrough. About half of audits lead to a Build Project. Half stand alone.
The audit, plus implementation of the top-priority fixes. Passage rewrites, structured data, entity graph build, and a 90-day visibility tracking baseline.
Ongoing AEO embedded with your team. Foundation (£5,000/month) is AEO as a single workstream, with senior time, a monthly four-stage scorecard, and a 6-month minimum. Larger integrated and partner retainers are scoped against the workstream mix.
Not sure which fits? Book a call. We'll tell you honestly which one is right, or that you don't need any of them yet.
Book a call →AEO citations begin appearing within 4-8 weeks of publishing well-structured passages on topics that match current AI retrieval patterns. Meaningful visibility across multiple AI search surfaces typically takes 6-12 months. This is slower than paid channels and faster than traditional SEO on competitive terms. Companies expecting leads within 30 days should look at paid search or outbound, not AEO.
No. AEO and SEO share significant technical infrastructure: clean HTML, structured data, authority signals, canonical architecture. Most of our clients run both disciplines in parallel. AEO becomes more important as AI search share grows, but Google traditional search still drives the majority of commercial traffic in 2026. The right approach is integrated, not a migration.
No honest AEO agency can guarantee specific citations. AI retrieval is probabilistic, not deterministic, and the models behind ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode retrain regularly. What we can do is engineer the technical and editorial conditions that make citation significantly more likely, and track whether it's happening.
Our AEO audit starts from £8,500. Scope: scoring your existing content against 40+ passage-level heuristics, mapping query fan-out for your top 10 commercial topics, and producing a prioritised backlog of passage-level fixes. Timeline: 3-4 weeks. No commitment beyond the audit.
Almost never. Most AEO work happens at the passage and structured-data layer, not the design layer. If your site has reasonably clean HTML and an accessible CMS, we can implement AEO improvements without a full rebuild. If you're on a legacy platform with no API access, that becomes a bigger conversation.
Our senior content lead drafts and edits directly, and we keep editorial ownership inside the team. Both Katie (11 years at We Are All Connected, award-winning fiction writer on the side) and Jon (previously Head of Content at Crunch and Content Director at Rocketmill) have serious editorial backgrounds. For specialist technical content we bring in freelance writers we've worked with for years, always briefed and edited by the in-house team. We don't outsource to offshore content farms. We don't use AI-only drafts.
We use schema for the jobs it actually does: classical rich results, Knowledge Graph entity disambiguation, voice surfaces. We don't claim schema feeds AI search engines, because the architecture doesn't work that way. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini read text as tokens. Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews use the Knowledge Graph for entity disambiguation, which structured data helps populate. That's the indirect path. We're honest about the difference.
Some pages shouldn't be reduced to a snippet or extracted into an AI answer. Pricing pages, policy pages, regulated content, anything where the full context matters. We use the standard preview controls (nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet, noindex) to govern this on a page-by-page basis. The question isn't whether to block AI search. It's which pages should be summarised, which passages excluded, and which pages should stay as the canonical public answer. Most AEO agencies don't think about this. We do.
Clean technical foundations are the precondition for everything else. AEO sits on top of structured data. Content strategy sits on top of clean architecture. If your site has crawl issues, canonical chaos, or JavaScript that AI bots can't parse, nothing built on top of it will work properly. We fix the foundations. Twenty years running this for clients with serious scale.
Most B2B content marketing is a keyword list disguised as a strategy. We build content estates grounded in real client work: hubs that rank, passages that get cited, guides that fill the sales team's LinkedIn feed with inbound. Two senior editorial leads, 18 years of evidence.
Most marketing teams have tried ChatGPT for first drafts, bought a Clay seat, and called it an AI strategy. We build the semantic knowledge base underneath: the persistent, queryable infrastructure that makes every AI workflow actually compound. We run our own. We build them for clients who want one.
Tell us what you're trying to fix, and we'll tell you honestly whether AEO is what you need or whether something else comes first.