Answer engine optimisation (AEO) for WordPress. Get your business into the answers, not just the results.
Most people who ask me about AI already know they should be doing something. They’ve noticed ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews answering the questions that used to send people to their site, and they can’t tell whether their business is in those answers or not. Usually it isn’t. The fix is concrete: the structure and content of the site, and the signals around it, done in a way AI systems can read, trust and repeat. I do this work for clients on WordPress, and the first two months for one of them looked like this.
Start here
A free AI visibility audit, back within three working days
Before you invest, you get a document that answers the question you came with: can AI systems find your site, read it, trust it and cite it, and if not, why not. Every item is scored pass, partial or fail, tagged by how much it matters and how much work it is.
You can act on it yourself, give it to your developer, or hand it back to me to action the work.
Can AI crawlers get in?
Whether robots.txt lets the right bots through (GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Bingbot and the rest), decided deliberately, since training bots and search bots are different things. Whether your CDN or firewall is quietly blocking them. Whether the content that matters is in the HTML the server sends, not added by JavaScript that many AI crawlers never run. Whether key pages sit behind logins, popups or cookie walls. Whether the sitemap is current and submitted to Google and Bing, because several answer engines draw on Bing’s index.
Can they extract an answer?
Whether headings are phrased as the questions people ask, with a direct answer of forty to sixty words underneath before any elaboration. Whether each section stands on its own with no “as mentioned above”. Whether comparisons, specs and steps use tables and lists. Whether FAQ sections reflect real customer questions rather than marketing ones. Whether the pages contain specific facts and numbers, which answer engines prefer to generic prose.
Can they tell what it is?
Whether the structured data says what each page is: Organisation with logo, contact details and links to your official profiles; Article with author and dates; Person for authors, linked to a bio; Service, LocalBusiness, Product or Event where they apply; FAQ and HowTo where the content genuinely fits; breadcrumbs. Whether all of it validates and matches what’s visible on the page.
Do they trust it?
Whether your About page says who you are, what you do, where and since when. Whether your name, address and phone number agree across your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories. Whether bylines lead to real credentials, claims cite sources, and pages show when they were published and updated. Whether a model could tell you apart from similar businesses.
Do others vouch for you?
This often matters more than anything on your own site, because answer engines lean on third-party sources. Mentions in “best X for Y” articles and industry publications. Reddit, Quora and forum threads where your category comes up. The volume and recency of reviews on Google, G2, Trustpilot and similar. YouTube, since transcripts get cited. Expert quotes in press coverage.
Is the site in good technical order?
Core Web Vitals passing. Correct canonical tags and no duplicate or thin pages diluting the signal. Clean semantic HTML: a real heading hierarchy, real tables, descriptive alt text. No orphan pages, with internal links connecting related topics. Content refreshed, with no “2025”-style titles going stale.
Is it working?
A set of twenty to fifty questions your customers ask, run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews, recording whether you’re mentioned, whether you’re cited or linked, how you’re described, which competitors appear instead, and which sources the engines cite. AI referral traffic separated out in analytics. Server logs checked for which pages AI crawlers actually fetch.
"Warren covered everything from website management, custom web design, lead generation strategies, and SEO, and recently implementing strategies for AI visibility too."
Get a free AI visibility audit
Send us an email requesting an AI audit and I'll respond with a few basic questions. From there it’s three working days to gather the audit details.
From audit to being cited: a project, then a retainer
The audit tells you where you stand. Getting cited is two kinds of work, and most sites need both, in this order.
The foundations project
Everything the audit marked partial or fail that lives on your own site: crawler access opened up, structured data that says who you are and what each page is, the About page and contact details made consistent everywhere, and the pages that matter restructured so each one answers a question directly. On WordPress I do this in the code and the content model, not with a plugin and a prayer, which is why the page consolidation on the client below kept its #1 AI Overview citation through a redirect with no loss. It’s a fixed piece of work with a start and an end.
The monthly retainer
Being cited is not a state you reach; it’s something you keep. The retainer is where the results come from: new pages written to answer the questions your customers are asking, local and directory signals kept consistent, structured data and llms.txt kept current as the standards move, and a report each month that tells you where you appear, for which questions, and what’s next. It’s the same shape as my SEO retainer, and for most clients it is the SEO retainer, with AI visibility measured alongside rankings.
Who this is for
Businesses that already spend on marketing and judge it by what it produces. The audit is free, the project and retainer are quoted after it, and I’ll tell you in the audit if I don’t think the work would pay for itself. If the site is on a page builder with nothing I can work with underneath, that conversation happens first, because the fixes above need foundations to stand on. A website rebuild is sometimes the honest first step.
Early results
What two months of this work did for one client
A Central Texas portable sanitation company, August to September 2026. A foundations project, then a retainer. Early, local, real.
Enquiries from organic search
first full month of tracking to the next
First enquiries
ever attributed to AI assistants
Search terms cited
first in Google’s AI Overviews by the end of month two.
Share of AI voice
baseline to month two, peaked at 46% along the way.
monthly visits from AI assistants
with the highest engagement rate of any channel.
A rebuilt city page
went from position 14 to the #1 AI Overview citation.
What people ask about AEO and GEO
01 What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
Very little in practice. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) both describe the work of making a website readable, trustworthy and citable to AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews. AEO frames it from the answer’s side, GEO from the engine’s. The checks, the fixes and the results are the same.
02 What does an AI visibility audit include?
Seven things: whether AI crawlers can get into the site, whether the content is structured so an answer can be lifted from it, whether structured data says what each page is, whether the business is clearly and consistently identified, whether other sites vouch for it, whether the site is in good technical order, and a measured baseline of where it appears across the main AI tools today. Every item is scored pass, partial or fail, and the fixes come back grouped by effort. Mine is free and takes three working days.
03 How do I know whether my business shows up in AI answers?
Ask the tools the questions your customers would ask, and see who gets named. The audit does this properly, with a set of twenty to fifty questions run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews, recording whether you’re mentioned, whether you’re cited, how you’re described and who appears instead. On a retainer that becomes a monthly report.
04 Is AI visibility really necessary right now, or is it hype?
It’s real and it’s measurable. AI answers are already taking clicks that used to go to search results, and the sites that are structured for them are being cited while the rest aren’t. The client results above {→ #results} are two months of a local business going from barely present to cited first on eight search terms. If you’d like the plain-English version of how it works, I’ve written about it on the insights blog.
05 Do I need to rebuild my site to be cited by AI?
Usually not. A well-built WordPress site from the last few years can gain real ground with structured data, content restructured around questions, consistent business details and technical fixes, all applied to what’s there. A site on a heavy page builder with messy code underneath gets less from those fixes, and sometimes a rebuild is the honest first step. The audit tells you which camp your site is in.
06 How long does it take to see results?
Weeks for the first signals, months for the pattern. In the client results above, a corrected line of copy was being repeated by AI assistants within a week, and a rebuilt page went from position 14 to the first AI Overview citation inside two months. Being cited consistently, across many questions, is what the retainer is for, and that’s a quarter-by-quarter story.
07 Is this the same as SEO?
It’s the next layer on top of it. Good SEO gets a site ranked in a list; AEO and GEO get it chosen as a source in an answer. They share foundations, which is why the AI visibility retainer and my SEO retainer are the same engagement for most clients, with AI citations measured alongside rankings.
08 Can you do this for an agency’s clients?
Yes, white-label, the same as everything else I do. I run the audit under your name, deliver the work behind the scenes, and give you a report your client can read. How I work with agencies.
Find out where you stand. It costs nothing.
Send me your site, and the questions your customers ask. Within three working days you’ll have a scored audit, the fixes in order, and an honest view of whether the work would pay for itself.