Ask ChatGPT to recommend someone in your trade in Toronto. Did your business come up? Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of making your business the answer when customers ask AI (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity) instead of scrolling ten blue links. Nearly half of consumers now use AI tools for local recommendations, while AI assistants recommend only a small fraction of existing local businesses. That gap is the new search opportunity, and most of your competitors have not started.
That is why our AEO work is structured SEO plus reputation plus measurement, not a magic tag. And why we will never sell you an “llms.txt file” or a schema snippet as an AI ranking trick. The evidence says they are not.
AI answers change run to run. Ask the same question ten times and you get different lists. Any agency showing you a single screenshot as your “AI ranking” is decorating, not measuring. We track a panel of 20 to 50 real buyer questions for your business (“best in Toronto,” “near me,” “who should I call”), repeated multiple times per cycle across engines, and we report your share of voice with its variance, trending month over month. You will know the number is real because we show you how noisy it is.
AEO is a multiplier on a working foundation. If your website cannot rank and your Google profile is empty, fix that first. We will tell you so in the audit, because it is the cheaper problem. If your foundation is solid, AI search is today’s cheapest land-grab: few Toronto competitors measure it, and the engines reward early, well-structured presence. Either way, the audit tells you which case you are in before you spend.
Included with any audit: crawler access, citability, and where you stand today.
Readiness fixes, a presence sprint, and three monthly share-of-voice reports. Quoted before we start.
AI share-of-voice tracking ships inside our SEO program as its own report section.
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making a business the answer that AI assistants (ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity) give when customers ask for recommendations. It works on three layers: a technically sound, crawlable website with answer-shaped content; a consistent reputation footprint across reviews, directories and local press, which AI engines cross-reference; and honest measurement, because AI answers vary between runs and credible tracking means repeated prompt panels reporting share of voice over time, not one-off screenshots. For Toronto businesses, AEO is currently a low-competition complement to SEO rather than a replacement for it.
Answer engine optimization: making your business the answer AI assistants give. The practice combines technical SEO, content structure, reputation building, and AI-specific measurement.
It is SEO’s next layer: same foundation, new surfaces, new measurement. That is why we sell it with SEO, not instead of it.
No, and nobody honestly can. AI answers vary run to run. We measure share of voice across repeated runs and grow it. That is a real, trackable number.
Yes, and so does everything written about you elsewhere: reviews, directories, local articles. AI engines cross-check. Our work covers both, starting from a site built to be read.