they ask AI. be the answer.

AEO, or answer engine optimization, is the work of making your business easy for AI assistants and AI search to find, understand, and cite. It covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Copilot: what they can read on your site, what other sources say about you, and how clearly your pages answer the questions customers ask.

SEO earns a place in a list of search results. AEO aims for a place inside the answer itself. They share one foundation, and Google’s own guidance says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO, so that is where we start: a crawlable site, useful pages, and accurate business information. AEO adds access for AI crawlers, consistent facts across the web, and tracking of AI answers.

They overlap. AEO often means direct answers in search, like Google AI Overviews. GEO, generative engine optimization, usually means citations in assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. AI SEO is used for both. The work is the same, so Prism AEO covers all of them.

No, and no one can. Assistants decide what to say, and answers change with the wording, the person, and the day. We improve what they can read and verify about you, then report what we see in dated, repeatable checks.

Every month we ask the same customer questions across the engines, several times each because answers vary from one ask to the next, and record how often you are cited, mentioned, or missing. We pair that with the platforms’ own data: the AI Assistant channel in Google Analytics, the generative AI report in Search Console for AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Bing Webmaster Tools, which counts citations in Copilot.

Yes. Search crawlers and training crawlers are separate. You can allow OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot, which find pages for search answers, while blocking GPTBot and ClaudeBot, which collect training data. We set these rules with you.

We ship crawler, schema, and listing fixes first, because they unblock everything else. Each engine re-crawls and refreshes on its own schedule, so changes in answers can take weeks or months and vary by engine. The monthly check shows you what moved.

Not necessarily. We start by checking whether AI crawlers can read your current site. Many of them do not run JavaScript, so pages that depend on scripts to show their content, block crawlers, or leave out key facts need fixes, and we scope them. Prism websites are built for answer engines from day one.

It is a proposed format for giving language models a reading guide to your site. Google says Search ignores it, and the other major engines have not said they use it. We publish one because it is quick and harmless, but we never rely on it. Crawlable pages, clear answers, and consistent facts do the real work.

Prism is fully booked right now, so AEO starts on the waitlist. When we reach out, we scope the questions, engines, and fixes you need and agree on the scope and price before work begins.