Answer Engine Optimization

A growing share of considered purchases starts with a question put to ChatGPT, Perplexity or an AI overview. Those answers are assembled from sources that are not the search results page, and almost nobody is managing what they say.

• Baseline first: what the assistants currently say about you, and about your competitors.
• The sources those answers draw from, corrected and kept current.
• Overlaps with your business listings, so the two are done together rather than billed twice.
• Re-measured on a schedule, because the answers move.

• A prompt set defined from what a real buyer would actually ask an assistant.
• A baseline: those prompts run across the assistants, recording who gets named and which sources the answer was built from.
• Bing index and Bing Places hygiene, which ChatGPT reads and most local businesses have never touched.
• The cited sources corrected and kept current: your profile, the directories, the review sites, your own pages.
• Pages restructured so an answer can be extracted from them, with stated facts, named entities and schema.
• The prompt set re-run monthly, reporting what moved and who displaced whom.

This is the whole diagnostic and it costs you five minutes.

1. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and ask each the question a buyer would ask: who is the best in your trade in your town.
2. Write down who gets named, and write down which sources the answer cites. The sources are the part that matters, because those are the pages doing the work.
3. Then ask each assistant directly about your own business and read what it says back. Most owners find something out of date, and a few find something that was never true.

What we cannot tell you yet. This field is new and most published figures in it come from vendors selling tools into it, so we treat them as directional and quote you none of them. What we can give you is a baseline of what the assistants say about you today, and a record of what changed after we worked on the sources.