What AEO Actually Means in Practice
AEO agencies work on the specific layer where most SEO efforts have not historically focused: the passage-level content quality that determines whether an AI system extracts and cites your content in a generated answer. Traditional SEO gets your page into the retrieval pool — indexed, crawlable, authoritative enough to be considered. AEO determines whether your content, once retrieved, is structured so AI systems can extract a specific passage, attribute it to your organisation by name, and include it in a generated answer rather than discarding it and moving to the next candidate.
The distinction matters because retrieval and citation are different outcomes with different revenue implications. A page can rank #1 in Google and be retrieved by Google AI Mode without ever appearing in the AI Overview — because the content, while good enough to rank, is not structured so individual sections can be extracted and cited independently. An AEO agency addresses the gap between “retrieved” and “cited.”
What an AEO Agency Should Actually Do
Content extractability audit. Every section of every priority page assessed against the six citation criteria: standalone opening answer (C1), explicit definitions (C2), specific attributed statistics (C3), named sources (C4), declared entities (C5), and an attributable claim (C6). Sections that fail one or more criteria get specific rewrite guidance, not vague recommendations to “improve quality.”
Entity corroboration build. The University of Toronto found that 92.1% of AI citations came from third-party sources, not the brand’s own content. An AEO agency that only works on your website is optimising 8% of the problem. The off-site corroboration layer — review platforms, editorial mentions, Wikidata, professional directories, Clutch/G2 — determines whether AI systems trust your entity enough to cite it. This is the work most SEO agencies avoid because it is slower and harder to attribute. It is also where most of the AI citation improvement comes from.
Schema markup implementation. JSON-LD schema at the page and section level tells AI systems what type of content they are looking at, who created it, and what it claims. Pages with Article schema and named author credentials are cited at significantly higher rates than equivalent pages without it. An AEO agency implements schema systematically rather than as a one-off technical task.
Platform-specific citation monitoring. AEO is not a single target — each platform (Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Copilot) retrieves from different source pools and uses different citation mechanisms. An AEO agency monitors citation frequency across all relevant platforms and diagnoses which platform-specific gaps exist. The platform comparison covers the technical differences. The AI Visibility Audit applies the diagnostic to a specific site.
What to Ask an AEO Agency Before Hiring
The questions that separate an agency with genuine AEO capability from one that has rebranded their existing SEO service with AI vocabulary: Can you show me a page you have optimised that now appears in Google AI Overviews for a specific query — and show me both the before and after content? What citation standard do you optimise to, and what are the specific criteria? What do you do for the off-site entity corroboration that the University of Toronto data shows drives 92% of AI citations? How do you measure citation frequency across multiple platforms, not just Google? What is your process when a client’s content gets retrieved but not cited — how do you diagnose which criterion is failing?
If the answers are vague, the agency is selling AEO positioning rather than AEO capability. For how SEO Strategy Ltd approaches AEO specifically, see LLM Optimisation services and the CITATE framework.
