AEO agency

AEO agency: be the answer AI gives your buyers

Sourcelift is an AEO agency. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of getting your brand named, cited and linked when ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews answer a buyer’s question directly. We run it as one program (technical fixes, content and mentions on the sites engines read), with published prices and results measured engine by engine every month.

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We’ve analyzed 200+ brands and read 1,000+ AI answers one by one. See real diagnoses →

As seen in AP (opens in a new tab) Business Insider (opens in a new tab) Yahoo Finance (opens in a new tab)

Illustration “Which CRM should a 10-person sales team use?” One buying question, four possible outcomes for your brand

Cited For a 10-person team, I’d start with YourBrand [1] Named, with a link to your site
Named YourBrand is also worth a look, according to a review site Mentioned, but the link goes elsewhere
Competitor Most teams this size go with Competitor A [1] The answer recommends someone else
Absent No mention You are not in the answer at all

01 / What AEO is

An answer has four outcomes for your brand. AEO works on all four.

AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of getting your brand named and cited when an AI system answers a question directly instead of returning ten links. It started with voice assistants. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews turned it into a buying channel.

Google says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO, and on the foundations we agree: an engine can only cite a page it can crawl, index and trust. What changes is the scoreboard. A ranking report tells you where a link sits. An AEO report tells you, prompt by prompt and engine by engine, whether the answer cites you, names you without a link, recommends a competitor or leaves you out.

Where the term comes from and what Google says about it: AEO in our GEO glossary.

See if AI cites me

02 / Our test

Where Google’s AI Mode looks depends on your category.

On October 8, 2026 we asked Google’s AI Mode 36 buying questions in US English, written the way buyers ask them, six from each category we work in, and logged every website each answer linked to. Google stopped the session after 34 questions. We logged the links of 32 answers: 265 linked websites, 8.3 per answer on average.

Share of linked websites that belong to companies selling in the category Google AI Mode, US search, October 8, 2026. 245 linked websites from 29 answers in five categories; hotels not charted.

Legal software and law firms
SaaS
Fintech
Health and wellness
Ecommerce and DTC

See the full breakdown

Websites linked by Google AI Mode answers, by category and type of site
Category	Answers	Links	Companies	Reviews and publications	Forums and video	Marketplaces
Legal software and law firms	6	63	45 (71%)	9 (14%)	9 (14%)	0 (0%)
SaaS	6	51	30 (59%)	7 (14%)	13 (25%)	1 (2%)
Fintech	6	57	21 (37%)	28 (49%)	8 (14%)	0 (0%)
Health and wellness	5	31	10 (32%)	15 (48%)	3 (10%)	3 (10%)
Ecommerce and DTC	6	43	6 (14%)	29 (67%)	7 (16%)	1 (2%)

71% vs 14%
In legal software and law-firm questions, 71% of the links went to companies selling in the category. In ecommerce, 14%: the rest were mostly reviews, lists, publications, forums and video.
23 of 32
Answers that linked to YouTube or Reddit, including 6 of 6 in SaaS and 5 of 6 in ecommerce. That is why Earn includes communities, not just press and lists.
1 winner, 0 sites
Asked for the best family hotel near Times Square, AI Mode named a single hotel as the best overall pick. Every source it showed was Google’s own hotel listings, not a website.

So we measure before we change anything. Where the engine reads company sites, your own pages carry the answer. Where it reads reviews, publications and communities, work that only edits your site misses most of it. Our AI Shelf Index for holiday gifts found the same pattern in ChatGPT: brand websites were 13 of the 66 sources it cited.

Method: six questions per category, written by us; one engine (Google AI Mode, which takes the country and language in the search itself and lists every source it reads), one run, from a signed-in browser outside the US with the search set to the US and English; Google showed the answers as personalized. Sites were classified by hand, with vendors’ own blog posts counted as companies, and a site counts once per answer. Hotels are not charted (3 hotel answers had links). Read it as a direction, not a benchmark. Test run by Tony G.

Where does AI look for your category? The free diagnosis checks all five engines and emails you who gets named instead of you.

Free diagnosis

Tony G, founder. You work directly with me, from your diagnosis to every monthly report.

03 / AEO services

What our AEO services include.

Every engagement runs on the Sourcelift Loop: a Baseline on day 0, then Fix, Ship, Earn and Prove every month: we measure on day 0, then every month we fix, publish, earn mentions and measure again.

Baseline

The questions your buyers ask, locked

20 to 40 real buying prompts for your category, run on five engines on day 0. Every later report is compared against this same set.

Baseline

Questions you can win first

Prompts where the category leaders are missing, the engines disagree or the sources are thin. You get 3 to 5 in the free diagnosis and the full map in the audit.

Fix

One clear story about who you are

Schema, crawl access for AI bots and the same facts about you on your site and on the profiles engines read, so no engine has to guess.

Ship

Pages that open with the answer

Comparison pages, commercial pages, guides and FAQs that answer a buyer’s question in their first sentences, then back it up. A fixed number every month.

Earn

Mentions where the engine already looks

The reviews, lists, publications and communities the baseline shows engines cite for your category. We earn those mentions; we do not buy link spam.

Prove

The same prompts, every 30 days

Answer status per prompt and engine, citations won, share of voice and the change since last month, with the raw data.

See if AI cites me See a full sample report →

04 / AEO, GEO and SEO

AEO, GEO and SEO: same foundations, different scoreboards.

How AEO, GEO and SEO differ
Aspect	SEO	AEO	GEO
Optimizes for	A ranked link on a results page	Being the direct answer to a question	Being used and cited inside generated answers
Where you show up	Google and Bing results	Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, voice assistants	The same AI engines, across many prompts
How it is measured	Rankings and organic clicks	Answer status per prompt: cited, named, competitor or absent	Citation rate and share of voice on a locked prompt set

The labels overlap, and Google treats both AEO and GEO as SEO. At Sourcelift they are one program: SEO comes built in, and the work is judged on AI answers. More on the overlap in GEO vs SEO, and on the full scope in our GEO services.

05 / How to choose

How to choose an AEO agency: six questions to ask.

Can I see the price before the call?

An agency that knows its scope can publish it. Ours is on the pricing page, from the free diagnosis to the largest program.
Which prompts will you track, and can I keep the list?

A fixed, written prompt set is the only way to compare one month with the next. If the prompts change every report, so do the results.
Do you report named, cited and linked separately?

A mention without a link and a citation with one are different outcomes. A single visibility score hides which one you got.
Which engines, and how often?

Answers change from one run to the next. Re-measuring every month on each engine you care about, with the raw answers, beats a screenshot.
What will you do outside my website?

In many categories the engine reads reviews, publications and forums more than brand sites, as our test above shows. A plan that only edits your pages misses most of the answer.
What do you refuse to promise?

Nobody controls what a model says. An agency that guarantees the first spot in ChatGPT is selling a guess.

Ask us all six on a 20-minute call. No deck. Or start with the free diagnosis and judge the measurement first.

Book an intro call

Still deciding between an agency, a tool or your own team? GEO agency vs tool vs in-house.

06 / Pricing

AEO services pricing, published.

Start with the free diagnosis or the $390 audit. Monthly programs start directly, no sprint required, and every one can be canceled free before the 15th.

Free diagnosis or $390 audit: what you get with each
	Free diagnosis $0 See whether AI names you	Fixed price GEO / AEO audit $390 What to fix, how, and in what order
Prompts on all five engines	A starter set of buying prompts for your category, with 25 to 50 answers reviewed one by one	A locked set of 20 to 40 buying prompts, saved so it can be re-run later
Your competitors	Who gets named instead of you, and which sources the engines pull them from	Who wins each citation, with which pages and thanks to which sources
Questions you can win	3 to 5	The full map, easiest first, with the page you need for each one
Checks	Not included	46 checks across seven areas AI visibility Competitors Keywords and demand Technical GEO Who engines think you are Content Off-site sources See all 46
Solutions	Not included	A fix for every finding. A page-by-page fix list for your developers or content team, plus quick wins you can ship in the first two weeks. For example: what to change in robots.txt for each AI crawler, which schema each template is missing, and which page you need for each question you can win.
Action plan	Not included	A 90-day roadmap ordered by impact, with the effort each action takes, to run with us or with your own team
Where to earn mentions	Not included	A ranked list of the sources worth earning, and the way in for each one
How you get it	A short report by email. No sales call.	A written report with the evidence for every finding, the raw data and an optional 20-minute call
	Get the free diagnosis	Buy the $390 audit Credited 100% against the sprint if you start within 30 days. Founder rate through December 31, 2026.

Solo $900/mo 2 content assets a month
Foothold $2,400/mo for the first 3 months, then $4,400/mo 4 content assets a month
Momentum $5,900/mo 8 content assets a month
Category Lead from $9,500/mo 16 content assets a month

Find your program Book an intro call

“Finally found an agency that actually gets GEO. […] Sourcelift is different. They understand how LLMs pull and cite sources, and they build strategy around that, not around Google rankings from 2015.”

Tom, review on ProvenExpert, October 2026

Good fit if

Your customers ask AI what to buy or who to hire: ecommerce and DTC, legal tech and law firms, health and wellness, fintech, SaaS, and hotels that want more direct bookings. In English, Spanish or both.
You want an agency built 100% for AI search, led by a founder from a Silicon Valley big-tech company.

Not a fit if

You need results in under 60 days: expect the first citation gains within 60 to 90 days.
You want rankings-only SEO: SEO comes built in, but the work is judged on AI answers.
Nobody asks AI about your category yet. The free diagnosis will show it, and we will tell you.

07 / FAQ

AEO agency, common questions

What does an AEO agency do?

An AEO agency gets your brand named and cited when AI systems answer a buyer’s question directly. At Sourcelift that means locking the buying prompts your category depends on, fixing how engines read and describe you, publishing pages that open with the answer, earning mentions on the sources engines already cite, and re-measuring every 30 days on ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

How much do AEO services cost?

At Sourcelift every price is published: a free AI visibility diagnosis, a $390 GEO / AEO audit credited in full against the sprint if you start within 30 days, an optional 90-day sprint at $2,400, and monthly programs from $900/mo (Solo) up to Category Lead, from $9,500/mo. Founder rates run through December 31, 2026.

See every price and what each program includes.

How long until AI engines cite us?

Expect the first citation gains within 60 to 90 days. Changes to your own pages can be picked up sooner by engines that search the web live; mentions on third-party sources take longer to earn and to show up. The monthly report shows the change per engine, flat months included.

Is AEO different from SEO?

They share foundations: an engine can only cite a page it can crawl, index and trust, and Google says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO. The difference is the goal and the scoreboard. SEO is judged on rankings and clicks; AEO on whether the answer names you, cites you with a link or names a competitor. At Sourcelift, SEO comes built in.

Which answer engines do you cover?

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on every engagement, and Copilot on request. Solo and Foothold focus the work on your highest-value engine, but we still measure all five, so you can see whether gains carry over to the others.

How do you measure AEO results?

With a locked set of 20 to 40 buying prompts, run on five engines on day 0 and again every 30 days. For each prompt and engine we record whether you were cited with a link, named without one, replaced by a competitor or left out, plus citations won, share of voice and the change since the last run, with the raw data.

Can you guarantee AI citations?

No. Nobody controls what a model says, and a guaranteed first spot in ChatGPT is a guess. We commit to the scope, the method and the measurement: a fixed prompt set, published deliverables and a monthly report that shows the change per engine, even when nothing moved. And if we read your brief before kickoff and do not think we can help, we refund the sprint or the first month of Solo.