AI assistants are the new search engine
For 25 years, "showing up online" meant ranking on Google's first page. That's still important. But it's no longer the whole job.
When somebody asks ChatGPT for "the best ecommerce consultant in Indiana" or asks Google's AI Overview "what does it cost to build a Shopify store," the AI generates an answer by pulling from a small set of sites it considers authoritative. If your site isn't structured for that pull, you don't get cited — and the click-through that comes with citation goes to your competitor.
AEO is the work to be one of the cited sites. Most local competitors haven't started yet. The Fortune 500 has. The window between those two is where the opportunity lives.
Pricing
- $1,500 baseline for marketing sites under 25 pages
- +$500–1,500 for ecommerce stores with product/category schema work
- +$500 for sites with no existing structured data at all
- 25% discount for clients on the SEO Management retainer
Optional: ongoing AEO management
$500–$1,500 per month after the initial audit. Covers monthly Q-and-A content additions, AI citation monitoring (which assistants are citing you, for what queries), quarterly schema reviews, and AI crawler accessibility checks as new bots emerge. Most clients run the audit first, see results, then move into ongoing management once the basics are in place.
The audit covers five fronts
- Structured data audit and implementation. JSON-LD schema across every page: Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, Product, Article, BlogPosting, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList. Validated against Google's Rich Results test before handoff.
- Content rewriting for AI extraction. Key pages restructured with explicit question-and-answer pairs and definitive statements that AI engines can quote verbatim. The same content humans want is also the content AI extracts cleanest.
- AI crawler accessibility. robots.txt cleanup, Cloudflare/CDN bot management settings, and explicit allowlisting of GPTBot, Google-Extended, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Applebot-Extended, and Common Crawl.
- Author authority infrastructure. Organization with sameAs links, author Person entities with jobTitle and knowsAbout, publisher chains so AI engines understand who's behind the content.
- Citation footprint baseline. Audit of where the business is currently mentioned on third-party sources AI engines trust (Clutch, Yelp, GBP, industry directories, news mentions). Recommendations for quick wins and a 90-day citation plan.
How we know this works
We just shipped the full AEO playbook on this site. Before the work: the homepage had basic LocalBusiness schema, no FAQPage anywhere, and Cloudflare was blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and every other AI crawler at the CDN level by default. After:
The same playbook applied to a client site is what you'd buy. We don't sell theory we haven't shipped on our own infrastructure first.
The Process
Two to four weeks from kickoff to handoff. Roughly 30–60 hours of work depending on site size.
- Week 1 — Audit. Crawl your site. Run every page through structured-data validators. Inventory existing content. Build the gap report. End-of-week walkthrough call to align on priorities.
- Week 1–2 — Schema + crawler work. JSON-LD added or upgraded across all page types. CDN-level AI bot allowlisting. robots.txt and meta noindex audit. Author authority schema set up.
- Week 2–3 — Content restructure. Key service and product pages rewritten with Q-and-A blocks. FAQ sections added where missing. Publisher chains and sameAs links populated.
- Week 3–4 — Validation and handoff. Every page run through Google Rich Results, Schema.org validator, and a manual "what would ChatGPT pull from this?" review. Final report with monitoring plan.
FAQ
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is the practice of structuring your website so that AI assistants like ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini cite it when answering user questions. SEO targets the traditional ten-blue-link search results page; AEO targets the answer the AI generates above (or instead of) those links. They overlap on fundamentals like crawlability and content quality, but AEO leans heavily on structured data (FAQPage, Article, Organization schema), explicit question-and-answer formatting, and AI-bot crawler accessibility, where SEO leans on keywords, backlinks, and on-page optimization.
AI assistants are increasingly the first stop for product research, local recommendations, and how-to questions. Google AI Overview now appears on roughly 20 percent of US search queries and that share is growing. ChatGPT and Perplexity are pulling traffic that would have gone to organic search five years ago. Sites that aren't structured for AI extraction don't get cited, and don't get the click-through that comes with citation. The window to be early is closing fast: most local competitors haven't started yet, but the Fortune 500 has.
An AEO audit checks five things: structured data coverage, AI crawler accessibility, content extractability, author authority signals, and citation footprint. Most small-business sites fail at least three of these out of the gate.
The audit deliverable is a written report identifying every gap between your current site and AEO best practice, with specific fixes prioritized by effort and impact. Implementation covers adding or upgrading JSON-LD schema across every page, rewriting key content blocks into Q-and-A structure, configuring AI crawler permissions, setting up author authority infrastructure, and submitting your site for AI bot indexing where applicable. Optional ongoing management covers monthly content additions and AI citation monitoring.
$1,500 to $3,500 one-time for the audit and implementation, depending on site size. Optional ongoing AEO management is $500 to $1,500 per month. SEO Management retainer clients get the audit at a 25 percent discount.
Honest answer: 4 to 12 weeks for the first AI citations, 3 to 6 months for the volume to be material. AI engines re-crawl, re-index, and re-train on different cycles than Google's traditional 24-to-48 hour reindex. The audit work itself ships in 2 to 4 weeks. The compounding traffic comes from being one of the few sites in your niche structured correctly when the AI does its next training or indexing pass. Anyone promising overnight AI citations is selling you something else.