Answer Engine Optimisation

The situation

Buyers have started asking an assistant before they open a search bar. They describe the problem and take the two or three names the assistant offers, drawn from whatever it has read and trusts. That answer is being given today, with or without your business in it.

Most businesses have no idea what that answer currently says. A brand can rank first on search and still be absent from the answer, or worse, be described inaccurately from an outdated page you never took down. You will rarely find the obvious sources among what gets cited, and nobody has looked closely enough to say why one competitor keeps coming up and another never does. The channel is already live. The only question is whether your business shows up in it.

What changes

You get a plain reading of what several assistants currently say about your business, run against a query set built from how your own buyers actually ask. Where you are missing or wrong, we show it; where a competitor is cited instead, we show which source earned that citation and why.

You earned search rankings one way. Getting cited by an assistant takes different work.

The three-month roadmap that follows turns that reading into a sequence: which structural changes come first, which content pieces close the biggest gaps, and in what order. You are not guessing at a channel with no evidence behind it. You are working from a scored baseline and a plan built to move it, with a monthly programme ready to run the plan once the audit ends.

How it runs

We start with your language rather than ours, building the query set from the questions your actual buyers would put to an assistant and the competitors they would be weighed against.

1. 01

   Build the query set

2. 02

   Measure across assistants and score

3. 03

   Diagnose structure, entities and content gaps

4. 04

   Deliver the roadmap and start the monthly loop

Diagnosis is where most of the week goes. We trace each weak or missing answer back to a cause, whether that is a structural gap, an entity your site never establishes clearly, or content that simply does not exist yet, so the roadmap addresses causes rather than symptoms. What you get at the end is a plan any team could pick up and execute.

What you receive

You receive the written report itself: what several assistants currently say about your business today, scored for mention, accuracy and citation, and set clearly against your named competitors. Alongside it, the diagnosis behind the score, covering structure, entities and content gaps in plain, specific terms.

You also receive the three-month roadmap that turns the diagnosis into an ordered sequence of work, written clearly enough to hand to whichever team is going to build it. If any part of the roadmap includes paid promotion, that spend stays in your own accounts and is never part of our fee.