Search behaviour has changed in ways that traditional SEO can’t fully account for. Your customers are asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI overviews for recommendations. They’re getting AI-generated answers instead of lists of links to click through. And the businesses that appear in those answers, confidently cited as the right choice, are capturing customers before anyone else gets a look. Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring your content and digital presence so AI systems can understand your business clearly, trust what you offer, represent you accurately, and recommend you by name when the right questions get asked. We bring the same rigour we’ve applied to SEO and digital marketing for over 25 years to this newer discipline, helping BC businesses show up in the places their customers are increasingly looking first.
When someone searches “who is the best landscaping company in Abbotsford” in ChatGPT, the result isn’t ten blue links. It’s a confident paragraph naming specific businesses. The companies that appear there didn’t get there by accident. They got there because their content is structured for AI to parse, their authority signals are consistent across the web, their business information is accurate everywhere it appears, and the information AI tools use to build their answers points clearly to them. AEO doesn’t replace the SEO work you’ve already done. It extends it, ensuring the visibility you’ve built in traditional search also translates into visibility in the AI-powered tools your customers are increasingly using instead.
AI answers
appear before search results
Fastest
growing traffic source in search
Billions
of AI queries processed daily
25+
years of SEO expertise behind our AEO
We begin by testing real queries in ChatGPT, Gemini, and other platforms to find out how your business is currently represented, or not represented, in AI-generated answers. Is your business being mentioned for the searches you care about? Are competitors being named where you aren’t? Is the information AI tools surface about your business accurate and complete? The audit gives us a clear baseline and a clear picture of the gaps we need to close. We also create and implement an llms.txt file as part of every AEO engagement, ensuring that the information AI tools use to describe you starts with a source you control.
Your website communicates differently to AI systems than it does to human visitors and bridging that gap is one of the most important things we do. Structured data markup tells AI tools the specific things your site is trying to communicate: who you are, what you offer, where you operate, and why you’re credible. We implement and validate the schema types most relevant to your business, including Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and others, and ensure that AI crawlers have the access they need to find your content.
The content format that gets extracted by AI systems and the format that ranks well in traditional SEO share some characteristics but aren’t identical. We know from experience that AI tools prioritize clear, direct, concise answers to specific questions over long-form explanatory content. They respond to specificity over vague claims and to structured question-and-answer formats over flowing prose. We restructure your existing content and develop new content that gives AI systems exactly what they need to confidently cite your business, without sacrificing the readability and value your human visitors expect.
AI tools draw their answers from the web’s established ecosystem of trusted sources, not just from your own website. Reviews, directory listings, earned media mentions, case studies, and consistent citation of your business name, address, and services across credible platforms all contribute to how confidently an AI tool will recommend you. We identify the gaps in your citation infrastructure and build the external authority signals that improve your AI representation over time.
AEO isn’t a one-time project. AI systems continue to learn, update their training data, and shift how they weight different signals. We monitor your AI visibility across platforms on an ongoing basis, track how your representation compares to your key competitors, and report back clearly each month on where you’re being cited, where you’re not, and what we’re doing about it.
AEO is new enough that most providers are figuring it out as they go. We bring 25 years of technical SEO experience to it, which means we understand how structured data works, how authority signals are built and maintained, how content needs to be structured for algorithmic systems, and how the underlying mechanisms that power AI answers connect to the search engine fundamentals we’ve worked with for decades. That depth of SEO heritage is a meaningful advantage in a field where most competitors are starting from scratch.
Some providers position AEO as a completely separate discipline that makes traditional SEO obsolete. We think that’s wrong, and the evidence supports us. Strong SEO makes AI tools more likely to find and trust your content. Strong AEO signals reinforce your overall domain authority. The two disciplines are deeply connected, and a team that understands both can build a strategy where each investment strengthens the other rather than competing with it.
AEO is a fast-moving space and the measurement standards are still maturing. We won’t promise you a specific number of AI citations by a specific date or guarantee placement in a particular AI tool’s answers, because nobody credibly can. What we will do is tell you honestly what the current best practices are, what we’re implementing and why, what we’re measuring, and what the data is showing us each month. If something isn’t working, we tell you before you have to ask.
We’re based in Abbotsford, Chilliwack, and Langley, serving businesses across BC and beyond. AEO matters for businesses of every size and location, but the specifics of how AI tools represent a local business in the Fraser Valley versus a professional services firm serving all of BC look different, and the strategy should reflect that. We build AEO strategies that account for your actual geographic scope and customer base, not a generic approach that ignores where you operate.
We rely upon their expertise and competency. Our relationship with them is viewed much like an extension of our own team. They are always quick to respond, and very time sensitive when it comes to completely deadline-driven project assignments. We are grateful to have FirstPage Marketing as one of our top ‘Go-To’s.
~ LeeAnn Ohanesian-Kinakin
Sunforce Organics
We sent a broadcast email to our existing clientele to let them know about our new website. Within the first few days we had over 40 enquiries. Great work!
~ Mike Hiebert
Valley Traffic Systems
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content, technical setup, and digital presence so that AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity can accurately understand, trust, and cite your business in their responses. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking in a list of links, AEO focuses on becoming the direct answer an AI produces when a relevant question is asked. We offer AEO services to businesses looking to build visibility in AI-generated search results.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps a website rank in Google’s traditional link-based search results. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) helps a business appear in the AI-generated answers that tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity produce instead of, or alongside, those link lists. The two disciplines are complementary: strong SEO signals help AI tools find and trust your content, and well-structured AEO content typically reinforces domain authority in traditional search as well. Most businesses benefit from both working together rather than treating them as alternatives.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), LLMO (LLM Optimization), and AI SEO are overlapping terms for related practices within the same discipline as AEO. GEO focuses on appearing in AI-generated summaries from tools like Gemini and Perplexity. LLMO emphasizes making your content accessible and trustworthy for large language models specifically. AI SEO is a broader umbrella for optimizing visibility across AI-driven search platforms. VEO (Voice Engine Optimization) applies these principles to voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant. We treat all of these as aspects of a unified AEO strategy rather than separate services.
Google AI Overviews now appear on a significant share of informational searches, presenting direct answers before any list of links. The major AI platforms collectively handle billions of queries every day, and AI-sourced web traffic has grown faster than any other channel in recent memory. Businesses that appear in AI-generated answers capture customers who never click through to traditional search results at all. For BC businesses, we’d argue the opportunity is particularly strong right now: most local businesses haven’t yet structured their content for AI visibility, which means the first-mover advantage is still available in most categories.
AI tools evaluate several signals when recommending a business:
We address all of these systematically as part of every AEO engagement.
We focus primarily on ChatGPT and GPT-powered search, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google Gemini, and Perplexity, since these are where the most business-relevant queries happen. We also ensure your site is accessible to the AI crawlers associated with each platform, since crawler access is a prerequisite for visibility. Voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant benefit from the same foundational content and schema work we do for text-based platforms.
Initial improvements in branded and local query visibility can appear within a few weeks of completing foundational AEO work, including schema implementation and content restructuring. Broader authority in competitive categories typically builds over three to six months as AI systems update their models and external citation signals accumulate. AEO results compound over time in a similar pattern to SEO, making earlier implementation meaningfully more advantageous than waiting. We give you honest, category-specific timelines during the consultation so you know what to expect before committing to anything.
We typically work across three categories of changes:
None of this harms your existing SEO performance. In most cases it improves it.
Schema markup is structured data code (typically JSON-LD format) added to a website that explicitly communicates to search engines and AI tools what a page means, not just what it says. For example, schema markup can tell an AI tool that a business is a web design company headquartered in Abbotsford, BC, serving clients across the Fraser Valley, rather than leaving the AI to infer this from the page text. Common schema types used in AEO include Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, and Article. When we implement schema correctly, it reduces the risk of AI tools misrepresenting or overlooking your business and increases the likelihood of accurate citation.
AEO is particularly valuable for local and small businesses in BC right now because most local businesses have not yet structured their content for AI visibility. When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a plumber, marketing company, or accountant in Abbotsford, Surrey, or Langley, the pool of well-optimized local businesses is still small. Businesses that complete foundational AEO work now are likely to hold those AI-recommended positions for some time before competition increases. We work specifically with BC businesses and understand what AEO looks like at a local and regional scale.
No. We don’t require long-term contracts for AEO. Most engagements run on a monthly retainer because AEO is ongoing work rather than a one-time project, but there’s no minimum commitment and no penalty for leaving. AI platforms keep evolving and the competitive landscape keeps shifting, so ongoing monitoring genuinely produces better results than a one-time implementation.
We’re here to listen to you. Tell us what you need or where you want to go. We’ll help you find the best solution.
