Audit where AI assistants send your buyers, then close the gap you can measure monthly.
Answer engine optimisation fails the way SEO used to fail: quietly at first, then all at once when a buyer asks ChatGPT who to hire and your brand is not in the answer.
Your site may rank for brand terms while ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews recommend someone else on the unbranded questions that start real work.
JavaScript-only rendering, WAF blocks and robots rules stop OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends. If they cannot fetch you, they cannot cite you.
Different descriptions on the site, LinkedIn, directories and press make the same company look like three. Assistants hedge or pick a clearer competitor.
Listicles, review sites, YouTube and trade press feed generative answers. If those pages name your rivals and not you, owned blog posts will not close the gap.
Classic SEO dashboards celebrate position changes. Answer engines reward being named and linked inside the response. Different result, different work.
Without an agreed starting point, nobody can show what changed after three months of AI SEO or generative engine optimisation work.
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation: the work of getting your brand named and cited inside the answers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews give your buyers. It sits on top of ordinary SEO, with the same need for a crawlable site and honest measurement but a different result that counts: citations, not rankings. It is the right next step when buyers already research your category in an assistant and you can show who appears instead of you today. We start by measuring where you stand, not with a promise.
We build the list of questions your buyers ask AI assistants, weighted by category, split across learn, consider and purchase, and overwhelmingly unbranded. Then we track who gets cited across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
We check crawler access for OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot, plus server-side rendering, schema graph and answer-first page structure.
Pages shaped around the questions you are absent from, with a citable answer in the first screen. Generative engine optimisation and AI SEO both need this; keyword stuffing does not.
One canonical description everywhere you appear. Organization, Service and FAQ schema that match it. Directories and Wikidata when the facts are earned, not invented.
We map the listicles, review sites, YouTube channels and press that AI already cites in your category, then work those sources so the next assembled answer has somewhere honest to pull your name from.
The three numbers that show it is working (crawler activity, AI referral quality and branded search), reported inside your own GA4, Search Console and analytics. Monthly in every tier. Every quarter we review what changed against where you started.
How we work
Six steps from an agreed list of buyer questions to a monthly report and a plain quarterly review. You always know what we measured, what we changed, and what comes next.
Step 1
Commercial categories, the answer engine optimisation question list agreed with you, engines and competitors agreed in writing.
Step 2
AI visibility, citations, sentiment, crawler access and connected GA4 / Search Console recorded before we change anything.
Step 3
Map the questions you are absent from, who generative engines cite instead, and the third-party sources those answers came from.
Step 4
Ship technical AI SEO fixes in your codebase, publish answer-first pages, clean the entity sheet and reach out to the sites AI already quotes.
Step 5
Weekly portfolio review. When visibility drops, rule out measurement, competitor moves, shifts in where AI looks, and site breakage before blaming the platform.
Step 6
Monthly report of what changed and what we shipped. Every quarter we review the first 90 days together and decide whether to continue, change course, expand, or fix a risk.
See the gap for free in 48 hours, or go straight to the fixed-price audit: where you stand today, who appears instead of you, and a 90-day roadmap.
See the gap before you spend anything
Free
One-page report in 48 hours. No call needed.
Where you stand, who appears instead, what to fix first
£1,500 + VAT
Fixed price. Ten working days. Credited against your first retainer month if you continue.
Sample of how we watch answer engine optimisation work: buyer questions tracked, engines named, citation status visible, technical fixes queued beside the measurement.
Weighted learn / consider / purchase buyer questions with citation status per engine. Sample data for the console fixture.
Agents draft the checks. Seniors decide what ships in the codebase and what gets chased off-site.
Question gaps, crawler blocks and the sites AI already quotes share one queue so AI SEO work does not splinter across vendors.
You keep analytics access and decisions. We multiply the watch and ship the technical fixes ourselves.
Eight handoffs before anyone owns the citation gap.
A lean visibility desk: buyer questions tracked, citations watched, technical fixes shipped in the same codebase that serves the pages.
Every one is a named client reviewing us on Google, not a quote we picked. Read them before you book anything, then hold us to the same standard.
Practical AI work for more than fifty UK businesses, from workshops to production systems. AI visibility is the same discipline applied to how your buyers search.
Websites, SaaS platforms, marketplaces and AI systems shipped for UK businesses. AEO is a new result to aim for on work we have delivered hundreds of times.
Twenty years of technical SEO and content work under the same brand. Answer engines change where the answer appears, not the foundations it is built on.
Technical answer engine optimisation work lands in the repository that serves your pages, not in a PDF of recommendations for someone else to ignore.
The audit price is published. Ongoing work is quoted from the 90-day roadmap before it starts. Nothing changes until you approve the starting picture.
Same foundations, different result that counts. Classic SEO earns a position on a results page. AEO earns a place inside the answer. Here is the job-by-job difference, and why you need both.
| The job | AEO | Classic SEO |
|---|---|---|
| What counts as a result | Being named and cited inside the answer an assistant gives, on the questions your buyers type. | A position on a results page and the clicks that follow it. |
| Research | A weighted list of buyer questions across learn, consider and purchase, overwhelmingly unbranded, agreed with you before measurement. | A keyword list ranked by volume and difficulty. |
| Tracking | Citation presence, which sites AI quotes, and sentiment across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. | Rank tracking for a set of keywords in Google. |
| Off-site work | The listicles, review sites, YouTube channels and press the engines already quote in your category. | Link targets chosen for authority and relevance. |
| Reporting | The three numbers that show it is working (crawler activity, AI referral quality, branded search) against where you started. Every quarter we review what moved. | Sessions, rankings and conversions month on month. |
| Foundations | Depends on every one of them. If assistants cannot fetch clean HTML, nothing above works. | Crawlability, indexation, schema, speed, entity consistency. Still the base layer. |
SEO earns rankings and clicks; AEO earns citations inside AI answers. Same foundations, different result that counts. You need both; AEO fails without SEO.
Guide · 8 min read
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We've recently completed Phase 1 of a bespoke business valuation tool with James at Code23, and I've been extremely impressed. He has taken the time to understand both the commercial and technical requirements, communicated clearly throughout, and delivered a well-thought-out system with a high level of flexibility. The admin dashboard, in particular, gives us full control over the scoring and valuation logic, which was a key requirement. I'm looking forward to working with James on Phase 2 and would have no hesitation in recommending him to anyone looking for bespoke software development – Jason Atkins, Director, Lansley Commercial
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It has truly been a fantastic experience working with the Code23 team. Every part of the process from the scoping and onboarding down to the design and implementation of our website was handled excellently. The quality of service delivered by the team is globally top standard and I couldn't be more satisfied with the final outcome.
I have worked with Code23 and their team for over 5 years across 3 different projects ranging from mobile app development to custom WordPress websites. Together the team bring a level of expertise and professionalism I have not seen anywhere else... The results achieved have really helped to grow our business. I highly recommend their services to anyone looking for a custom project to be completed on time and in budget.
We worked with Code23 for a complete rebuild of our music related website. Excellent customer service and quality throughout and the build they have now completed is fantastic - exceeded all expectations across the board. Fantastic company with a dynamic and motivated team who are great to work with. Would highly recommend!
Joe and the team at code23 have done a fantastic job helping us design and build our new website. I feel they really captured the quality of the Draks brand. Would highly recommend.
Code23 is a Reading, Berkshire AI-native agency that has built and ranked websites since 2005. We ship the technical answer engine optimisation fixes ourselves, run the same programme on code23.com, and publish prices before anyone asks.
guides
What is AEO, AEO vs SEO, what an AI visibility retainer costs, and how ChatGPT and Claude choose who to recommend. Written from the work we run on our own site.
View all postsAEO stands for answer engine optimisation: the work of earning recommendations and citations inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. It covers technical access for AI crawlers, answer-first pages, entity consistency and earned mentions in the sources those engines already trust.
They share the foundations: a crawlable site, honest measurement and content that answers real questions. They differ in what counts as a result. Classic SEO tracks rankings and clicks on a results page. AEO tracks whether assistants name and cite you on the questions your buyers type. You need both, and AEO fails without the SEO foundations underneath it. Our AEO vs SEO guide walks through the differences job by job.
A practical example: you discover ChatGPT recommends three competitors on "best [your category] agency UK" while your site is absent. You open blocked crawlers, publish an answer-first page that states a citable method, earn a mention on a listicle those answers already use, then re-measure the same question thirty days later against where you started.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO), generative engine optimisation (GEO) and AI SEO / AI search optimisation are overlapping labels for the same job: becoming the brand assistants retrieve and cite. We use AEO on this page, keep GEO and AI SEO in the copy so searchers find us, and run one programme rather than three retainers.
Our AI Visibility & Search Audit is £1,500 + VAT (fixed, ten working days). The free AI visibility snapshot shows the gap in 48 hours with no charge. Ongoing work after the audit is quoted from the 90-day roadmap before anything starts, and the audit fee is credited against the first month if you continue.
It works as a contribution, not a guarantee. Conductor CMO study 2026: 94% of enterprises plan to increase AEO or GEO investment in 2026. Searchable's analysis of AI citations, September 2026, shows professional services brands earn only 26.9% of their AI citations from their own domain (retail 28.6%, finance 29.6%, hospitality 33.7%, B2B tech 41.4%), so third-party sources matter. We report the three numbers that show it is working in your own analytics. We do not promise a placement.
First we measure where you stand. The first 90 days focus on crawler access, entity clean-up, answer-first pages for the biggest question gaps, and earning mentions on the sites AI already quotes. At month three we review what changed against that starting picture and decide together whether to continue, change course, expand, or fix a risk.
No. Guaranteed placements and paid mentions are a red flag. Assistants choose sources by their own retrieval rules. We improve the evidence they can find and measure whether citations move. Anyone selling a guaranteed ChatGPT listing is selling a promise they cannot keep.
Our own prompt tracking plus your GA4, Search Console and analytics stack (including PostHog where you already use it). We do not lock the programme to a third-party vendor dashboard you cannot keep if you leave.
Yes for the routine work: crawler checks, sampling buyer questions, draft answer-first outlines and monitoring alerts. People still decide the diagnosis, approve what ships in your codebase and own the quarterly review.
The free snapshot checks five high-intent questions and shows who appears instead of you. The £1,500 audit gives the full picture and a 90-day plan. We only suggest ongoing work if the audit shows it is worth it.
