Rank on Google. Get cited by ChatGPT.

Two surfaces. One engagement, because the foundation underneath them is the same, and paying two agencies to build it twice is just paying twice.

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One page, two readings

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yoursite.com › guides › crm

Best CRM for a mid-size B2B sales team

A buyer’s guide to CRM selection for teams of 20–200, covering pipeline management, forecasting accuracy and…

Judged on position. Wins by being clicked.

Assistant answer

For teams of 20–200, the deciding factor is usually forecasting accuracy rather than feature count.1

1 · yoursite.com

Judged on being quotable. Wins by being cited.

What one page has to do twice

01 Why this exists

They stopped being two audiences

One article, two readers. Search judges it on position and rewards a click; an assistant judges it on whether a passage survives being lifted, and rewards a citation. Write for one and hope for the other, and you get neither.

For a decade the split made sense: SEO chased a position in a list of ten links, and everything else was a different budget. That list is now the thing underneath the answer rather than the answer itself, and the model writing the answer reads the same pages the crawler indexes.

Which means the foundation is shared. Crawlability, structure, entity signals, and content worth quoting serve both surfaces. What differs is the target, a ranked page versus a quotable passage, and that difference lives in how the content is written, not in whether the site can be read at all.

Run as two engagements, the shared half gets built twice and the two teams disagree about the templates. Run as one, the technical work happens once and the content is written for both readings.

02 Definition

What is Managed AEO + SEO?

Managed AEO + SEO
Managed AEO + SEO is a single retainer covering both answer engine optimisation and traditional search optimisation. Answer engine optimisation makes a brand quotable by assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude; search optimisation makes its pages rank in Google. The two share one technical foundation, crawlability, structured data, entity signals and content that can be parsed, so running them as one engagement builds that foundation once instead of paying two agencies to build it twice.

  • From two budgets to one foundation

    Crawlability, structure and entity signals serve both surfaces. Split across two agencies, the shared half gets built twice and the two teams disagree about the templates.

  • From ten links to one answer

    There is no position ten in an assistant's reply. You are named or you are not, and the list of links is now the thing underneath the answer rather than the answer itself.

  • From clicks to citations

    A ranked page wins by being clicked. A quoted passage wins by being cited, which can happen without a visit, and often does.

03 What’s included

Four things land. All of them are built, not filed.

  • 01

    The source map

    Which pages, publications and platforms the assistants actually draw on for your category, and which competitors they name today. That map is what sets the build order. It's cheaper to earn a mention where the model is already looking.

  • 02

    Passages and pages

    Definitions, comparisons and direct answers written to be lifted whole by an assistant, on pages structured to rank in classic search. Same article, both jobs.

  • 03

    The technical layer

    Schema that parses, entity markup, server-rendered content, clean crawl paths, and crawler policy that lets the answer-time agents through. Written and shipped by us.

  • 04

    Reporting on both

    Prompt-level visibility across the engines alongside the rankings and traffic you already track, so the retainer is answerable in the terms your board uses.

04 How it runs

In order, and in the open.

  1. Step 01

    Audit and map

    We fetch your site the way the answer-time crawlers do, score what comes back, and map the sources feeding your category's answers. You get the findings whether or not you continue.

  2. Step 02

    Fix the foundation

    Crawler access, rendering, schema and structure first. Until a model can reach and parse the page, nothing written on it counts.

  3. Step 03

    Build the sources

    Passages, comparisons and the pages that answer the questions your buyers actually type. Published on a cadence rather than in one batch.

  4. Step 04

    Measure and adjust

    Monthly reporting on where you're named and where a competitor is, and the next month's work chosen from what moved.

05 The difference

Two agencies vs One engagement

 Two agenciesOne engagement
Technical foundationBuilt twice, inconsistentlyBuilt once, shared
Content briefWritten for rankingsWritten for rankings and extraction
ReportingTwo dashboards that disagreeRankings and share of answer together
Who ships the fixQueued with your developersOur engineers, in your repo

06 Who it’s for

Four markets, four different questions.

  • B2B software

    Buyers research through assistants long before a demo. The questions are comparative, alternatives, integrations, fit for team size, and the answer names two or three vendors.

  • DTC and ecommerce

    Category questions now start with an assistant. “Best X for Y” returns a shortlist, and being absent from it costs the consideration set, not just the click.

  • Healthcare

    Trust and provenance dominate. Assistants lean hard on sources they can attribute, which makes structured, citable content and clean entity signals disproportionately valuable.

  • NDIS and disability services

    Participants and coordinators ask assistants for local providers. The answers lean on directories, reviews and clearly structured service pages, which most providers have never marked up.

07 Questions

What buyers ask about this one.

Something not covered? Ask us directly and we’ll answer straight.

Is AEO replacing SEO?
No. It extends it. The pages an assistant quotes are the pages a crawler indexes, so crawlability, structure and authority still decide whether you are eligible at all. What changes is the second half of the job: a ranked page wins by being clicked, a quoted passage wins by being liftable and attributable. Anyone telling you to stop doing SEO is describing a channel that still sends most of your traffic.
Which assistants does this cover?
ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. They retrieve from overlapping but different source sets, so we track them separately. Being named on one is no guarantee on another, and a report that averages them hides exactly the gap you would act on.
How soon does anything move?
Technical fixes register fastest: once a blocked crawler is unblocked or broken schema validates, pages become eligible within weeks. Content and authority take a quarter or more, because the sources an assistant leans on have to exist and be cited before they count. Anyone quoting you a fixed number is guessing.
Do you work with our existing content team?
Usually, yes. They know the product and the customer better than we will in month one. We bring the source map and the extraction constraints, what makes a passage liftable, and review against those rather than taking the writing away from people who are already good at it.
What happens in the first month?
The audit and the source map. You get a scored technical report with every finding traced to a line in your HTML, and a baseline of which prompts name you today versus a competitor. Both are yours whether or not the engagement continues.
Do we have to drop our SEO agency?
Usually not, and we'll say so if the answer is no. Traditional search still sends traffic and the technical foundations serve both surfaces. We work alongside an existing team, or take the technical layer off their hands if that's simpler. What we won't do is duplicate work someone is already doing well and bill you for it.
How long is the commitment?
Month to month after an initial quarter. The first quarter exists because the technical work front-loads: the audit, the fixes and the first content batch all land early, and judging the engagement before those have had time to be crawled would be judging the setup rather than the work.
What does it cost?
It depends on the size of the site and how much of the technical backlog is ours to build rather than review. We scope it after the audit, so the number is based on what your site actually needs rather than a package tier.

Next step

Start with what your site already says.

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08 The rest of the work