Ortem Technologies

    AEO & GEO

    Answer Engine Optimization Services

    Get cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews — not just ranked below them

    AEO and GEO for B2B software and services companies selling into the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UAE and Singapore. Prompt-level audits, citation assets, and source-pool placement — measured against named competitors, reported monthly.

    All Marketing & SEO Services
    Clients Worldwide
    300+
    Projects Delivered
    1,000+
    Rated on Clutch & GoodFirms
    5/5
    Years Experience
    13+

    What is AEO?

    Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of getting a brand cited inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Copilot — rather than only ranking in the blue links below them. It works differently from SEO: AI answers are assembled from a small pool of retrieved sources, so the goal is entering that source pool. In practice that means earning placement in the ranked listicles and directories assistants retrieve, publishing extractable pages with named buyers and quotable figures, and structuring content so a model can lift a passage cleanly. Ortem Technologies delivers AEO for B2B software and services companies across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UAE and Singapore.

    A buyer used to type a keyword and pick from ten blue links. Increasingly they ask a question in full sentences — “who builds fleet management SaaS,” “best AEO agency for B2B SaaS” — and read a single generated answer that names three or four companies. If you are not one of the names, the ten blue links underneath rarely get the click.

    AI answers are assembled, not written

    An assistant answering a vendor question does not reason about your company from memory. It retrieves a small pool of pages — usually the ones already ranking — and assembles an answer from what they say. This has a hard consequence that most SEO work ignores: if you are not in the retrieved pool, no amount of on-page optimisation puts you in the answer. The first question in any AEO engagement is not “how do we rank” but “what is this category’s answer actually being built from.”

    For vendor questions, that pool is mostly other people’s rankings

    In our own September 2026 audit of B2B software buying prompts, roughly 85% of the top-ten results were not vendor service pages at all. They were “Top 10 X Companies in 2026” listicles, directories and comparison posts — frequently published by a competing agency that ranks itself first. That is the uncomfortable shape of the market: the page that answers a buyer’s question about your category is usually written by someone else, and being excellent at your own website does not get you into it.

    So the work splits in two. On pages you own, the job is extractability — a named buyer, a quotable figure, a stated position, and clear scope boundaries, structured so a model can lift a clean attributable passage. On pages you do not own, the job is placement — getting into the rankings and directories that already occupy the answer, and earning the editorial citations that come from publishing numbers other people need.

    What we will not tell you

    We will not promise a citation in ChatGPT. AI answers are non-deterministic, they shift with model updates, and no agency controls retrieval or generation. We will not sell you a dashboard as a strategy — prompt-tracking tools are useful instrumentation and terrible deliverables. And we do not buy links; paid networks build a profile you pay someone to disavow later, and they do nothing for citation because assistants retrieve pages that rank on merit.

    Want the baseline first? Request an AI visibility audit → Tell us your category and your target markets; we will run the prompt set and show you who is being named instead of you.

    Capabilities

    What AEO Actually Involves

    Prompt-Level Visibility Audit

    We map the buying questions your customers actually ask, run them live in every target market, and record whether you appear, who appears instead, and which pages the answer is built from.

    Citation Asset Development

    Cost breakdowns, benchmarks and head-to-head comparisons written to be quoted rather than to rank. A publisher needs a number they can lift with attribution — that is what earns the citation.

    Source-Pool Placement

    AI answers for vendor questions are assembled from third-party rankings and directories. We identify the ones that actually rank in your category and run the submission and outreach programme to get you inside them.

    Extractability Rewrites

    Passage-level restructuring of your service and product pages: a named buyer, a quotable figure, a stated position, and a clear scope boundary — the shape a model can lift cleanly.

    Entity & Schema Layer

    Organization, Service, FAQPage, Speakable and citation schema, plus consistent NAP and entity signals across the directories and knowledge sources models read. This is how a model knows what you are.

    AI Crawler Access

    robots.txt and llms.txt policy for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot and Google-Extended, plus render checks that confirm your content exists in the HTML crawlers actually receive.

    Method

    How We Run an AEO Engagement

    1. 01

      Prompt set definition

      We build the question set with you — the real phrasing buyers use, not keyword strings — and agree the target markets and the competitors we will benchmark against.

    2. 02

      Baseline measurement

      Every prompt is run live in every market. We record your appearances, competitor appearances, AI Overview presence, and the exact pages each answer draws from.

    3. 03

      Source-pool analysis

      We separate the ranking set into the global layer that appears in every market and the local layer that changes per country, then rank each source by how reachable it actually is.

    4. 04

      Fix and build

      Schema and extractability work on pages you own, citation assets where the category rewards a quotable number, and a placement programme for the third-party sources worth entering.

    5. 05

      Re-measure and report

      The same prompt set, the same markets, on a fixed cadence — so movement is measured against a stable baseline rather than against a moving one.

    From our own research

    What a Prompt-Level Audit Surfaces

    These figures come from Ortem’s own September 2026 audit of B2B software buying prompts across seven markets. They are market conditions, not client results — the point is what a prompt-level baseline makes visible before any work starts.

    • Buyer prompts returning a Google AI Overview20/21

      Ortem audit of 22 B2B software buying prompts, US market, September 2026

    • Top-ten results that are third-party rankings, not vendor pages~85%

      Same audit — the ranked set is dominated by listicles, often published by competing agencies

    • Ranked positions reviewed across seven markets490

      49 live result sets in US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UAE and Singapore

    • Markets where a local pack takes three of ten slots3 of 7

      UAE, New Zealand and Singapore — those slots are won with a Business Profile, not content

    Markets

    Why Single-Market Audits Give the Wrong Answer

    Run the same buying question in seven countries and each result set splits into two layers. A global layer of the same handful of listicles and directories appears almost everywhere. A local layer of country-domain incumbents — .co.uk, .com.au, .ae, .ca — changes completely at every border.

    That distinction decides your strategy. Where a category has a thick local layer, you need a per-market plan and a credible local presence. Where it has none, one well-built page can compete in every market at once. We tell you which of those you are in before you spend anything, and in three of the seven markets we cover — UAE, New Zealand and Singapore — we also flag the local pack, because a verified Business Profile wins three of ten slots there and no amount of content will.

    • Prompt set covering your real buying questions, per market
    • Competitor citation map — who is named instead of you, and where
    • Source-pool inventory: the exact pages your category is answered from
    • Placement shortlist ranked by reachability, not by domain rating
    • Schema and entity gap report with the JSON-LD to ship
    • AI crawler access and render audit across GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot
    • Extractability scoring on your top service and product pages
    • Quarterly re-measurement against the same fixed baseline

    Engagements

    Ways to Work With Us

    Engagement models. All three include the baseline prompt audit.
    EngagementWhat you getTimelineFrom
    AI Visibility AuditPrompt-level audit across your buying questions and target markets, source-pool analysis, competitor citation map, and a prioritised fix list2–3 weeks$1,500
    AEO FoundationThe audit plus implementation: entity and schema layer, extractable page rewrites, citation-asset build, and directory placement programme10–14 weeks$9,000
    Ongoing AEO RetainerMonthly prompt tracking, new citation assets, placement outreach, and quarterly source-pool reporting against named competitorsMonthly$1,500/mo

    Every engagement starts with the audit, because without a baseline there is nothing to measure movement against. If the audit shows your category is not yet being answered by AI in any meaningful volume, we will tell you that and recommend you spend the budget elsewhere.

    Coverage

    Surfaces and Standards We Work Across

    AI & ML

    • Google AI Overviews
    • ChatGPT Search
    • Perplexity
    • Microsoft Copilot
    • Claude
    • Google Gemini

    Data

    • JSON-LD / Schema.org
    • llms.txt
    • Speakable & FAQPage
    • Knowledge Graph entities

    Other

    • Search Console
    • GA4

    FAQ

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of getting a brand named and cited inside AI-generated answers rather than only ranking in traditional search results. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google AI Overviews for a vendor shortlist, the model assembles its answer from a small pool of retrieved sources. AEO is the work of getting your brand into that pool — through the ranked listicles and directories assistants retrieve, through extractable on-page content, and through a clean entity and schema layer that lets a model match your company to a specific question.

    You still need SEO, because AI answers are largely grounded in ranked search results — if you are nowhere in the top ten, you are usually nowhere in the answer. The difference is what you optimise for. SEO optimises your own page to rank. AEO optimises for being quoted, which often means work on pages you do not own: getting listed in the third-party rankings and directories that already occupy the top ten, and rewriting your own pages so a model can lift a clean, attributable passage. A page can rank well and still never be cited, because nothing on it is quotable.

    The terms are used interchangeably in practice. AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is usually framed around being the cited answer to a question. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is usually framed around visibility inside generative systems as a whole. The underlying work is the same: source-pool entry, extractable content, entity clarity, and structured data. We use AEO throughout because it describes the outcome buyers actually want, which is being named when someone asks.

    We measure at the prompt level, not the keyword level. We define the buying questions your customers actually ask, run them against live search and AI assistants in each target market, and record three things: whether your brand appears, which competitors appear instead, and which specific pages the answer is assembled from. That last one is the actionable measure — it tells you exactly which listicles, directories and publishers you need to be inside. We re-run the same prompt set on a fixed cadence so the number moves against a stable baseline.

    The audit gives you a baseline in 2 to 3 weeks. Schema, entity and extractability fixes are typically reflected within 4 to 8 weeks, because they depend on a recrawl rather than on earning authority. Source-pool entry — getting into the third-party rankings that AI answers are built from — is the slower half and generally takes 3 to 6 months, since it depends on placement and editorial cycles you do not control. Anyone quoting a fixed date for a citation in ChatGPT is guessing.

    Platforms: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT and ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, and Google Gemini. Markets: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UAE and Singapore as standard, with other markets on request. Market coverage matters more than most agencies admit — for most service categories roughly half of every top ten is country-domain incumbents, so a single-market audit will misread your position everywhere else.

    No, and you should treat any agency that guarantees it as a red flag. AI answers are non-deterministic, they change with model updates, and no vendor controls a model's retrieval or generation. What we commit to is the input side: measurable movement in the source pool your category is answered from, tracked against a fixed prompt set and named competitors, reported monthly. That is the thing that can actually be managed.

    We do not buy links. Paid link networks are the fastest way to acquire a spam profile that needs disavowing later, and they do nothing for AI citation because assistants retrieve from pages that rank on merit. Where a legitimate directory or industry ranking runs paid or sponsored placement, we will tell you the cost, the traffic and citation value, and let you decide — but we will never present a paid placement as an earned one.

    Find Out Who Is Being Named Instead of You

    Give us your category and your target markets. We will run your buying questions live, show you the competitors AI names in your place, and hand you the source pool your category is actually answered from.

    Also see: Digital Marketing & SEO · LLM Integration · AI Agent Development