Being the answer, not a position.
An assistant that answers your customer’s question cites somebody. This is the work of being that somebody, and the only honest way to run it is to ask the questions, record who got cited, do the work, and ask again. We started our own benchmark at 0 of 55 and the chart below says so.
What this is, before the sales part. AEO is getting cited as the answer rather than ranked in a list, and the work is mostly unglamorous: answer a real question in the first sentence, put the evidence next to it, name the source, make the page fast and crawlable, and be the kind of site an engine can quote without hedging. Nobody can guarantee a citation — the engines do not publish their rules and they change them. What can be guaranteed is the measurement, which is why the method below starts and ends with asking.
Ask, record, write, ask again.
The benchmark, including the part that is zero.
Read those numbers the way we do
They are small. 5 sessions from AI assistants and 40 from search, between 3 September 2026 and 15 October 2026, measured first-party with our own analytics and with our own machines excluded. That is a starting line, not a result, and anybody showing you a chart that climbs on a programme this young is showing you something they drew.
They are also ours, which is the reason they are here. Most agency case studies are a client’s numbers you cannot check, presented without the months that did not work. We would rather publish a small true number, then publish the next one next month, whichever way it goes.
What the 5 AI sessions do prove is that the arrivals are real: an assistant cited us, somebody followed it, and the visit landed in our own events table with the referrer attached. The data report is built on the same instrument.
Deliverables, not hours.
Six things, and which of the three plans carries each. The measurement is in all of them.
The benchmark, monthly
Your own set of buyer questions, asked the same way every month, with who was cited each time. It is the number the whole programme is judged on, including when it does not move.
Pages that answer a question
Written answer-first: the question in the heading, the answer in the first sentence, the evidence under it with a source. Named pages, agreed in advance, not a content quota.
The structural half
Schema that matches what the page says, internal links that make an answer findable, and the speed and crawlability work without which none of the rest can be read.
A written account each month
What was done, what the benchmark did, and what we think it means. If a month produced nothing worth reporting, that is what the report says.
Your content, yours
Everything written is yours, in your site, with no licence back to us and nothing that stops working if you leave.
No third-party trackers
Measurement is first-party. We will not install an analytics suite on your site to prove our own work, and we do not on ours.
Three, monthly, no lock-in.
| Plan | Monthly | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Visible | A$990 / US$650 | The benchmark, re-run and reported monthly, plus the pages that answer the gaps it finds. |
| Growth | A$1,990 / US$1,300 | The above, plus a content programme: a named set of pages a month, written to answer questions you can see being asked. |
| Authority | A$3,900 / US$2,500 | The above, plus the structural work — schema, internal linking, migrations and the technical fixes that decide whether a site can be cited at all. |
AUD ex GST for Australian clients, USD everywhere else. Cancel whenever — the content is yours and nothing stops working. One-off work is priced separately: see the cost guide for builds, and web development for the structural jobs that need a developer rather than a retainer.
Ten questions, two business days, no card.
We will put ten buyer questions from your category to the assistants and send you what they actually said: the answers, who was cited, and where a competitor appears instead of you. A person does this by hand — it is not an instant report, which is why it takes two business days and why it is worth reading.
Straight answers.
What is AEO, and is it different from SEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation is getting your page used as the answer rather than ranked in a list. The work overlaps with SEO heavily — crawlability, structure, speed, authority — and differs in one way that matters: a ranked page wins a click, a cited page wins the answer and sometimes no click at all. So the measurement changes. Counting positions tells you nothing about whether you were quoted.
How do you measure it?
By asking. 55 buyer questions a real customer would type, put to the assistants your customers use, with who got cited recorded each time. Then the same 55 questions the same way next month. It is manual, it is unglamorous, and it is the only method we have found that produces a number you can argue with.
Can you guarantee I will be cited?
No, and nobody can. The engines do not publish their selection rules, they change them, and an answer that cited you in March can stop in April with no change to your site. What we can do is make your pages the best available answer to questions you can name, and then count. We will show you the count whether it moved or not.
What does the free AI visibility check include?
Ten buyer questions for your category, put to the assistants, with the answers recorded and who was cited in each. You get what the assistants currently say about your category, where you appear and where a competitor does instead. Two business days, done by a person, no card and no account.
Is llms.txt part of this?
It is a file we will write for you and it is not the lever. Ahrefs studied 137,000 domains and found 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests; Google has said publicly it does not support the format. We publish a free generator for it and we tell everyone the same thing: keep one because it costs nothing, and do not buy it as a route into an AI answer.
What is actually in a month?
Deliverables, not hours: the benchmark re-run and reported, a named set of pages written or rewritten to answer specific questions, the structured data and internal links that let them be found, and a written account of what moved and what did not. If a month produced nothing worth reporting, the report says that.
Is there a lock-in?
No. Monthly, cancel whenever, and the content is yours. A retainer that needs a contract to survive is a retainer that is not working.
Where to go from here
- The free AI Store Check — instant and automated, for whether an assistant can read your store at all. It is the machine half of what the manual check above does properly.
- Navaal: AI SEO, AEO & GEO — the Shopify app, if the job is a whole catalogue of product pages rather than a content programme.
- The GEO checklist — the whole method as a list you can work through yourself, free, with nothing withheld.
- Web development — when the reason you cannot be cited is the site rather than the content.