Answer engine optimisation for UK trade businesses

What answer engine optimisation actually involves

AEO is not a separate internet. It is the same business information, presented so a language model can parse it without guessing. Most trade websites fail on the basics rather than anything exotic.

• Entity clarity: one consistent name, address, phone number, service list and coverage area everywhere a machine can see them.
• Answer-first writing: the question restated and answered in the first paragraph, before the marketing copy.
• Structured data that matches the visible page, so the machine-readable version and the human version agree.
• Crawler access: assistants and their retrieval crawlers can reach the page, and are not blocked at the CDN, firewall or robots layer.
• Source-worthiness: specific, checkable facts an assistant can quote rather than adjectives it has to ignore.

How AEO differs from ordinary SEO

SEO optimises for a ranked list of links. AEO optimises for being included inside a single synthesised answer, where there is no page two. The overlap is large, and good SEO foundations are a prerequisite, but the emphasis shifts. Ranking position matters less than whether your facts are unambiguous, current and easy to lift. That is why an AEO audit spends most of its time on structure and consistency rather than keyword placement.

What our AEO audit checks

We look at what is publicly observable about your business, plus your connected website. Owner-only fields we cannot see stay recorded as unknown rather than guessed.

• Your website: headings, answer-first structure, page speed, schema, internal linking and crawler access.
• Your public profiles: consistency of business facts across the places assistants commonly draw from.
• One documented Google-grounded query, run and dated, recording whether your business is named and whether your site is cited.
• A prioritised action list: the handful of changes with the most leverage, in the order we would do them.

What nobody can promise you

No agency or tool controls whether an assistant names your business. Model outputs vary between users, sessions and updates, and a permissive robots rule does not prove a crawler can actually reach you. What we can do is measure the same defined query over time, fix the foundations that are demonstrably broken, and keep dated evidence of what changed. Treat anyone guaranteeing AI mentions or citations as selling something they cannot deliver.