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If you are here because of customs paperwork, you want the other AEO. In importing and exporting it means Authorised Economic Operator, a status that HMRC's guidance calls "an internationally recognised standard" showing that "your business's role in the international supply chain is secure". When we searched "what is AEO" from the UK on 7 November 2026, Google's AI answer gave both meanings, with the marketing one first. Everything below is about answer engine optimisation.
What does AEO stand for?
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation, spelt optimization in American guides. An answer engine is any tool that replies to a question with a written answer instead of a list of links: ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and the voice assistants on your phone.
The optimisation is the work that makes your business easy for those tools to find and describe correctly. For a local plumber or accountant the aim is simple: when someone asks for a recommendation in your area, your name is in the answer and the details beside it are right.
What is GEO?
GEO is short for generative engine optimisation, and it describes the same job. The term comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, and Wikipedia's entry opens by calling GEO "also known as answer engine optimization (AEO)". You will also see AI SEO and LLM optimisation used for it. We call it AI visibility, because being visible in the answers is the result you are paying for.
The label only matters when you buy. If one agency quotes for GEO and another for AEO, ask both which customer questions they will check and who makes the fixes. Their answers will tell you more than the name on the proposal.
What AEO looks like for a local business
Take a customer in Bromley whose boiler has packed up on a Sunday. They open ChatGPT and type "Who's the best emergency plumber in Bromley?"
ChatGPT keeps no list of good plumbers. OpenAI's help page explains that ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers", rewriting a question into one or more searches it sends to them, and that it may use the person's approximate location to do it. OpenAI's own example turns "What are some good restaurants near me?" into the search "top restaurants San Francisco". ChatGPT reads what comes back and writes a short answer with a few names in it.
AEO covers everything that decides whether your business is one of those names, and whether the details beside it, such as your opening hours and phone number, are right. The tools look at the same kinds of place a careful customer checks before calling: your Google Business Profile and its reviews, the directories that list your trade, your own website, and other sites that mention you.
When those places disagree, the tool is less sure which business is which, and it names someone it is sure about. When they say little, it has nothing to repeat. Our guide to getting your business recommended by ChatGPT works through each of them in order.
Is AEO better than SEO?
No. AEO builds on SEO (search engine optimisation), and most of the work is shared. Google's guidance for its AI answers says "The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search" and "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary". ChatGPT starts from search results too, as the plumber example shows.
AEO will not take over SEO while the answers are built from what search engines find. What AEO adds is the checking: asking the AI tools your customers' questions and correcting what they get wrong. Our guide to AEO vs SEO sets out the differences and what a local business should do first.
How much does AEO cost?
AEO costs nothing if you do the groundwork yourself, and from under a hundred pounds to several thousand pounds a month if you pay for help. On 7 November 2026 we checked nine UK agencies that publish their prices. Their monthly prices start between seventy-nine pounds, for an add-on to an SEO plan, and two thousand five hundred pounds, and six of the nine start between about three hundred and seven hundred and fifty pounds a month. One-off audits run from one hundred and twenty-nine pounds to three thousand.
| Agency | What it publishes | How it is sold |
|---|---|---|
| UpStream Studio | Seventy-nine pounds a month for AEO and GEO together, on top of its SEO plan at one hundred and ninety-nine; a one-off diagnostic for one hundred and twenty-nine | Add-on to an SEO plan |
| BrisTechTonic | Combined SEO and AI answer plans at two hundred and ninety-nine, four hundred and forty-nine and eight hundred and forty-nine pounds a month, plus VAT | Part of SEO, three-month minimum |
| Spiderscope | Four hundred and ninety-five, six hundred and ninety-five and one thousand one hundred and ninety-five pounds a month, excluding VAT, plus a setup fee of one hundred and twenty-five | Monthly packages |
| LoudCrowd | From four hundred and ninety-seven pounds a month plus VAT after a one thousand pound deposit, or five thousand five hundred plus VAT for the year | Yearly agreement |
| AVO | Growth tier from five hundred pounds a month, a diagnostic from one thousand, and Enterprise from three thousand five hundred a month | Monthly, with a diagnostic |
| built by humans | From seven hundred pounds a month plus VAT, with 30 customer questions tracked every day across four AI tools, and four articles and a press release each month | Monthly, content included |
| Refound | A five hundred pound audit, then seven hundred and fifty for the first month and one thousand a month after that | Audit, then monthly |
| IINES | A two hundred and forty-nine pound audit and a seven hundred and forty-nine pound fix sprint, with an optional retainer from two thousand one hundred a month | Fixed steps |
| Trisec | AEO work from two thousand five hundred pounds a month, and audits from fifteen hundred to three thousand | Larger monthly retainers |
The spread is wide because one label covers different amounts of work. Four things move the price.
The first is how much groundwork is missing. If your Google profile is half finished, your reviews are thin and your website says little about your services and areas, the first months go on fixing that, whatever the invoice calls it.
The second is how much checking you get. UpStream Studio's add-on tracks 15 questions a month, while the built by humans plan tracks 30 every day.
The third is whether anyone makes the fixes. A report saying ChatGPT has your opening hours wrong is useful. The answer only changes when someone corrects the listing it came from.
The fourth is extras. Some plans include articles or press releases every month, which a local trade may not need.
You can buy the work in five ways:
- Do it yourself, which costs time rather than money.
- Buy it as part of an SEO plan, or as an add-on to one, as UpStream Studio and BrisTechTonic sell it.
- Pay for a monthly service that tracks the answers and makes the fixes.
- Book a one-off audit and fix sprint, then keep up the work yourself.
- Subscribe to tracking software, which shows you what the AI tools say and leaves the fixes to you.
Our own AI visibility service tracks 20 of your customers' questions every week across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews, and makes the fixes each month. We measure it with AEO Sonar, the AI visibility tracker we built. It runs month to month, and we recommend three months, because new reviews and pages take that long to show. The starting price is published on our AI visibility page, and what you pay depends on how many services and towns you want tracked. If you are pricing ordinary search work at the same time, our guide to what SEO costs in the UK compares those prices the same way.
Can you do AEO yourself?
Yes, and most local businesses should start that way. The groundwork is free:
- Finish your Google Business Profile: categories, service areas, hours, photos and a description that says what you do and where. Google's guidance on its AI answers lists checking that your "Business Profile information is up-to-date" among the basics that still count.
- Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere, letter for letter.
- Ask every customer for a review, and reply to the reviews you get.
- Give each service in each area its own page, with the facts in plain sentences.
- Check that your website lets ChatGPT in. OpenAI's crawler guide recommends "allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site's robots.txt file" if you want to appear in ChatGPT search.
- Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers ask, and note who they name. Our free AI visibility checker asks five AI tools 12 questions like these for you.
Paying someone makes sense once that groundwork is done and you want the checking and fixing to happen every week without you. Before then, most of what you would pay for is the groundwork itself.
What no one can promise
No one can promise that ChatGPT will name your business, so walk away from anyone who does. OpenAI says of its own search results that "Placement is not guaranteed", and warns that "Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect". Google says the same of its index: "Indexing and serving isn't guaranteed."
What a good provider can show you is evidence: what each AI tool said about you this week, and what was fixed. Judge the work on that. When you want it done for you, see how our AI SEO service works.