Articles
Short, practical pieces on how AI assistants decide who to name when a buyer asks who to hire — and what your business can do about it.
Six criteria: a measured baseline, AEO as core work, a clear explanation of how AI assistants decide who to name, transparent scope and pricing, no invented proof or guaranteed rankings, and work you can verify yourself.
AEO is worth paying for when buyers in your category ask AI assistants who to hire and those assistants don't name you. How to test both before you spend.
When AI names a competitor instead of you, it's quoting the clearer, better-corroborated answer — not the better business. Here's how to take the slot.
Most South African accounting firms are invisible when business owners ask AI assistants for an accountant. Here's why — and the concrete steps to change it.
A 2026 directory of South African providers offering Answer Engine Optimisation to accounting and advisory firms — what each one does, how they differ, what it costs, and the five questions to ask before you sign.
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of getting your business named when buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google's AI Overviews who to hire.
AI assistants name the businesses they can read, trust, and lift a clean answer from. When yours isn't named, three things are usually missing: a parseable website, a plain statement of what you do and where, and independent sources that repeat your name.
Give AI assistants a crawlable site, a clear answer to the buyer's question, and independent sources that repeat your name. Skip any one and the recommendation goes to a competitor who covered all three.
SEO gets your pages into the list of links. AEO gets your business named inside the AI answer that now sits on top of it. The foundations overlap; what they reward differs.
They all retrieve web pages and let a language model choose what to cite, but they draw from different indexes — Bing for ChatGPT, its own for Perplexity, Google's for AI Overviews — and reward different signals. The common ground is crawl access, a direct answer, and a consistently described, trusted business.