When your buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI who to hire, the engine names a handful of businesses and everyone else vanishes. Our AEO service makes yours one of the names - audited, tracked with monthly citation-share reporting, and grown alongside your Google rankings.
Traditional SEO fights for a spot in a list of links. AEO fights for a place inside the answer itself. Here's how the three approaches stack up for a service business today.
The old way
Optimise for keyword rankings, build backlinks, chase page one. Still valuable, but it defends a single search surface while a growing share of your buyers quietly move to asking AI assistants directly.
The new way
Optimise for citation: crawler access, answer-shaped passages, entity signals, and brand mentions. You get quoted by AI engines while most competitors are still arguing about whether it matters.
What we do
Why choose? One coordinated program ranks you in Google AND gets you cited by AI. The same schema, content, and authority work feeds both surfaces, so every hour invested pays twice.
Comprehensive answer engine optimization delivered as a single coordinated program.
We run structured prompt panels - the real questions your buyers ask - across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, then log which brands each engine names and which sources it cites. You get a baseline citation-share report showing exactly where you appear, where competitors own the answer, and which prompts are winnable first. Every engagement starts here, because you cannot improve what you have never measured.
AI assistants can only cite what their crawlers can read. We publish and maintain an llms.txt file that hands language models a clean, prioritised map of your most citable pages, then audit robots.txt rules, rendering, and server responses so GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended can actually reach them. We also remove the JavaScript rendering traps that silently block AI crawlers on many service-business sites.
AI engines do not cite pages - they cite passages. We restructure your key content into answer-shaped blocks: a direct one-to-two sentence answer up front, supporting detail underneath, and headings that mirror how questions are actually asked. Definitive statements, named entities, and properly attributed data give an engine something safe to quote, which is what turns your page from background reading into the cited source.
We deploy Organization, Service, FAQPage, HowTo, and Person structured data tuned for machine reading, not just rich snippets. Consistent entity data - the same name, location, services, and relationships everywhere your brand appears - helps LLMs verify who you are and connect you to the topics you want to own. Contradictory markup does the opposite, so we audit and repair what is already there before adding anything new.
LLMs learn brand associations from the wider web, so a brand nobody mentions is a brand no AI recommends. We build unlinked mentions, co-citations alongside recognised names in your industry, and digital PR placements in publications AI engines treat as trustworthy. Over time these signals train models to reach for your name when someone asks for a recommendation in your category.
Reddit threads, YouTube transcripts, industry forums, directories, and review platforms all feed AI training data and live retrieval. We identify which third-party sources surface in AI answers for your buyers' questions, then get your genuine expertise represented there - real answers, real contributions, real reviews, never astroturfing. It is often these external sources, not your own site, that tip an engine into naming you.
We build a prompt panel from the real questions your buyers ask, run it across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, and log every brand named and source cited. You get a baseline citation-share report you can hold us accountable to.
We map your gaps against the audit: crawler access problems, missing or contradictory schema, content with nothing quotable, and the third-party mentions competitors have that you don't. Everything is prioritised by impact and speed to result.
llms.txt goes live, schema is deployed and validated, key pages are rewritten into answer-shaped passages, and brand mention outreach begins. We ship in fortnightly sprints so improvements land continuously, not in one big reveal.
We re-run the prompt panel monthly and report citation frequency, share of voice against named competitors, and AI referral traffic. Winning prompts get defended, near-misses get targeted next, and the panel grows as your visibility does.
We combine strategy with execution to deliver measurable results.
Tell us where you want to compete. We'll show you exactly how to get there.
“Ned and the team at Orkkid did an outstanding job rebuilding our website for Keystones Energy Solutions. From the start, they understood our business and delivered a clean, professional site that actually converts. Since the rebuild, we've seen a noticeable improvement in lead generation and the quality of enquiries coming through.”
Owner, Keystones Energy Solutions
“We couldn't be happier with our new website! The design perfectly captures our brand, and our clients are finding it much easier to explore our services. Thank you Ned and the Orkkid team for your wonderful work!”
Founder, Ghost Booth Events
“Hiring Ned has been an absolute game changer for our business. Coming into this, we didn't know the first thing about SEO, and truth be told, I was highly concerned because our industry is incredibly competitive. Fortunately, we found Ned, and he completely put those fears to rest. He devised a highly tailored strategy just for us, taking the time to educate us on the process and set realistic expectations. Not only has he delivered exactly what he promised, but he has also managed to make a serious dent in our competitive market, positioning us incredibly well. We are now consistently receiving high-quality inquiries through both traditional SEO and AEO. It has diversified our lead generation, and I have total confidence that he will continue to drive incredible results for us. We fully intend to work with Ned for the foreseeable future and cannot recommend him highly enough.”
Owner, Uprise Digital
“We've had a great experience working with Ned! The communication has been excellent, the website looks and functions much much better, and the entire process has been smooth from start to finish. We know SEO takes time, but we're already seeing positive signs and improvements. Overall, we're very happy with the work and look forward to continuing our collaboration!”
Owner, Avant Garde Moving
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of getting your business cited, quoted, and recommended inside AI-generated answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. When someone asks an AI assistant a question your business can answer - or asks it outright who to hire - the engine composes a response from a handful of sources it trusts. AEO is the work of becoming one of those sources: making your content easy for AI crawlers to read, shaping passages so they can be quoted safely, and building the brand signals that teach models to associate you with your category.
Traditional SEO earns you a position in a list of links; AEO earns you a place inside the answer itself. The foundations overlap - quality content, technical health, structured data, and authority matter to both - but the emphasis shifts. AEO cares about passage-level citability rather than page-level rankings, about AI crawler access via llms.txt and robots rules, and about brand mentions across the wider web, because language models learn who to recommend from far more than your own site. In practice the two disciplines reinforce each other, which is why we run them as one coordinated program rather than separate retainers.
Broadly, yes. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), AI SEO, and LLM optimisation are overlapping labels for the same goal: visibility inside AI-generated answers. Some practitioners reserve AEO for question-and-answer surfaces like Google AI Overviews and GEO for chat assistants, but the actual tactics - crawler access, citable passages, entity-consistent schema, and brand mentions - are essentially shared. We use AEO as the umbrella term and optimise for every generative surface your buyers use.
ChatGPT and its search mode (OpenAI), Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Claude (Anthropic), and Microsoft Copilot. Each behaves differently: Perplexity and ChatGPT search cite live web sources on almost every answer, while Gemini and AI Overviews lean heavily on Google's existing index and ranking signals. We track your citation share on each platform separately and weight the effort toward the engines your customers actually use, which for most Australian service businesses means Google's AI surfaces and ChatGPT first.
We maintain a panel of prompts built from the real questions your buyers ask: service queries, comparison questions, and direct who-should-I-hire requests. Each month we run that panel across every major engine and record which brands are named, which URLs are cited, and how your business is described. That produces a citation-share figure per engine, trended over time and benchmarked against named competitors. It is the AEO equivalent of rank tracking, and it is how you hold us accountable.
It depends on your starting authority. Sites with an established presence often see first citations within four to eight weeks of the technical and content fixes going live, because engines like Perplexity and ChatGPT search retrieve from the live web rather than waiting on model retraining. Newer or thinner domains typically need three to six months of authority and mention building before models consistently reach for them. We sequence the work so fast technical wins - llms.txt, schema, citability rewrites - land early while the slower brand-signal moat builds underneath.
Yes, though differently from classic SEO. We measure citation frequency and share of voice through monthly prompt panels, referral traffic arriving from AI platforms in your analytics, growth in brand mentions across training-eligible sources, and movement in branded search volume, which often lifts as AI exposure grows. What no honest agency can promise is a fixed position one in ChatGPT - answers vary by phrasing and session - which is exactly why we report trends across a stable prompt panel instead of one-off screenshots.
You need a technically sound, crawlable site with genuinely useful content, which is the shared foundation of both disciplines - but you do not need to finish SEO before starting AEO. Most early AEO work is SEO-adjacent anyway: schema, site structure, and content quality lift both surfaces at once. If your site has serious technical problems we fix those first, because no engine, traditional or generative, can cite what it cannot read. Our free website audit will tell you which side needs attention first, and our SEO service covers the traditional half of the hybrid program.
The label might evolve; the buyer behaviour will not. A large and growing share of people now ask AI assistants for research, comparisons, and direct recommendations, and Google has moved AI answers above its own organic results. Optimising for how machines read, verify, and cite information is simply what search optimisation looks like now. The underlying assets AEO builds - clean structured data, genuinely authoritative content, and a widely mentioned brand - hold their value no matter which interface wins.
llms.txt is a plain-text file published at the root of your site that gives language models a curated, markdown-friendly map of your most important pages - a sitemap built for AI readers rather than human ones. It is an emerging standard, not a guarantee of citations, but it costs little to implement well and it pairs with the work that matters more: making sure GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended are not blocked, and that your key pages render as clean, extractable text. We handle all of this as part of our AI crawler optimisation stream.
Language models learn associations from patterns across the whole web. When your brand is repeatedly mentioned alongside your services, your location, and other trusted names in your industry - in press coverage, directories, forums, reviews, and community discussions - models learn to connect you with that category, even where no link exists. That is why unlinked mentions, which classic link building ignores, carry real weight in AEO. We build them deliberately through digital PR, genuine community participation, and review growth.
Service businesses whose buyers research before they hire: trades, solar and energy, dental and health practices, legal, financial, and professional services, and local operators competing on trust. These are exactly the categories where people now ask AI for a shortlist instead of scrolling ten blue links. If a recommendation from ChatGPT or Google's AI would send you a qualified lead, AEO applies to you. As a remote-first team we work with service businesses right across Australia - our case studies show the kinds of clients we partner with.
