c20% of Search is now answered by AI.[1]
LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude capture a meaningful share of research, learning, and commercial investigation queries. Research measured 68,879 Google searches and found that when an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result on just 8% of visits — (that's down from 15% when no summary appeared). [1]
AI citation is the new SEO.
If you got here by asking how to get your company mentioned in ChatGPT or cited on Perplexity — that is exactly the service.
Trusted by brands running across the UK, North America and EMEA
Bain's research puts the figure at around 60%. Its December 2024 survey of 1,117 consumers found about 80% rely on zero-click results in at least 40% of their searches. Bain estimates the resulting reduction in organic web traffic at 15–25%.[5]
ChatGPT's share of worldwide AI platform traffic fell from roughly 76% to 53% in the year to May 2026, while Gemini rose to 27–28% and Claude to about 9%.[6] Whether you want to be mentioned in ChatGPT, cited by Perplexity or pulled into Google's AI Overviews — a one-engine strategy already misses half the room.
Semrush analysed over a billion lines of US clickstream data and found outbound referral traffic from ChatGPT to the rest of the web grew 206% year on year between January 2025 and January 2026.[7] A new channel, already at scale.
Most companies assume that if you rank in Google (SEO), you'll get quoted by AI LLM's. The reality says otherwise.
BrightEdge's 16-month tracking found citations increasingly do come from organically ranking pages — overlap rose from 32.3% to 54.5% by September 2025. But only 16.7% come from the top ten; most cited pages sit between positions 21 and 100.[2] Ranking still helps. Ranking first does not reliably buy you the citation.
Omniscient Digital analysed 23,387 unique sources cited across 240 branded queries in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews. Editorial, forums, review sites and directories together account for nearly half of all citations. On customer review queries specifically, earned media reaches 82%.[9]
That is an uncomfortable finding for anyone selling on-page optimisation alone, and it is the reason AEO is a distinct discipline rather than an SEO add-on. Winning citations requires three things running together: content structured so a model can lift a clean answer from it, an entity and schema layer that tells machines unambiguously what you are, and a deliberate earned-media programme aimed at the third-party sources these systems actually quote. Academic work supports the first part — the 2023 generative engine optimisation paper from Princeton, IIT Delhi, Georgia Tech and the Allen Institute for AI found structured methods, principally adding citations, quotations and statistics, lifted source visibility in generated answers by up to 40% on their benchmark.[10]
Two independent data say the same thing: being cited more than doubles your clicks, and the people who arrive are worth more when they get there.
Seer Interactive tracked 53 brands across 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion organic impressions from January 2025 to February 2026. Brands cited in an AI Overview averaged 2.07% organic click-through. Brands not cited averaged 0.94%.[3]
Adobe Digital Insights tracked AI-sourced traffic to US retail sites from October 2024 to May 2026. In May 2026 these visitors were 36% less likely to bounce, viewed 23% more pages per visit, spent 53% more time on site, converted at a 54% higher rate and generated 53% more revenue per visit than non-AI traffic.[4]
Similarweb found the share of US ChatGPT prompts returning any cited source rose from 1.6% to 6.8% between June 2025 and May 2026 — but it varies sharply by category. Travel and hospitality prompts carry a citation about 23% of the time and automotive roughly 20%, while professional services sits under 4%.[6] In consumer categories, AI answers already route to named sources and the land grab is well advanced. In professional services the citation habit is only now forming — which is precisely when it is cheapest to own.
The process is simple, the work is not - but the fundamentals remain the same whether you want your company mentioned in ChatGPT, cited by Perplexity or featured in Google's AI Overviews. AEO is not a proprietary trick: it is an editorial and PR engine bolted to a technical one, run & optimised consistently.
We establish what the answer engines currently say, in their own words, before touching anything.
We make your content mechanically easy for a model to quote, and your identity unambiguous to a machine.
Because 48% of citations come from sources you don't own, we go and get them.[9]
Citation share is the metric. We report it monthly, per surface, against named competitors.
Simplicity Media[11] is our Canadian media agency, providing Media Buying Strategy and Services across Canada — A category where Similarweb shows fewer than 4% of ChatGPT prompts return a cited source at all. We used it as the test case before selling the service to anyone else.
A full application of the four workstreams to a live agency site: Structured service pages, entity and schema build, a case-study library written for extraction, and an earned-media push into trade and directory sources. Tracked across five key answer surfaces against a named competitive set.
Find out what the answer engines say about you now. No commitment beyond it.
The on-page and structural layer, run continuously and reported monthly.
Adds the earned-media engine — the 48% of citations that never come from your own site.
Regulated sectors — financial services, legal, healthcare — are quoted at an additional 35% premium over the equivalent unregulated retainer, reflecting compliance review load.[12] We will quote that explicitly if it applies to you.
*Digital PR has tiered options for external placement depending on product and industry, these are priced separately.
ChatGPT decides what to name two ways: what it learned in training, and what it retrieves live from the web when it browses. You influence both with the same work. Make your site technically readable to OpenAI's crawlers, publish pages structured so a model can lift a clean answer, keep your entity unambiguous with schema markup and consistent naming, and build presence on the third-party sources these systems lean on — editorial coverage, review sites, directories and forums, which carry 48% of all AI citations.[9] Then track a fixed prompt set monthly so you can see mention share move. That is precisely the work we sell, and none of it is secret.
Perplexity is the most winnable surface because it retrieves live and cites sources on every answer. Three things move it: fast, crawlable pages it can fetch; answer-first structure it can quote cleanly; and presence on the sources it already trusts for your category — which you find by running your buyers' questions and reading who it cites today. Our Diagnostic maps exactly that citation pool before we touch anything.
Not just by ranking. BrightEdge found only 16.7% of AI Overview citations come from pages in the organic top ten — most cited pages sit at positions 21–100.[2] What earns the citation is content structured for extraction — a direct answer high on the page, statistics, quotations and clear sourcing, the tactics the original GEO research measured at up to a 40% visibility lift[10] — plus schema markup and an unambiguous entity. Ranking helps. It is not the mechanism.
Usually one of three reasons, and they are diagnosable. The engines cannot read you: your site blocks AI crawlers or renders in ways they cannot parse. They cannot place you: your entity is ambiguous — inconsistent naming, no schema, thin structured signals. Or they cannot verify you: there is little third-party evidence of you in the places they cite, and earned media carries most citations.[9] Our £2,500 Diagnostic identifies which of the three is holding you back and hands you the 90-day plan, whether or not you engage us further.
Answer engine optimisation is the practice of making a brand the source an AI system cites when it answers a question. Where SEO competes for a ranking position on a results page, AEO competes for inclusion inside the generated answer itself — in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. It combines structured on-page content, entity and schema work, and earned third-party citations.
They optimise for different outcomes. SEO earns a ranking; AEO earns a citation, and the two correlate far less than most marketers assume. BrightEdge found that as of September 2025 only 16.7% of Google AI Overview citations came from pages ranking in the organic top ten, with most cited pages sitting between positions 21 and 100. A separate analysis of 23,387 unique sources by Omniscient Digital found 48% came from earned media and only 23% from the brand's own website — meaning most of the available leverage sits off your domain entirely. Good SEO helps. It does not cover this.
Published UK benchmarks run roughly £1,500 to £5,000 for a one-off audit and entity foundation, £2,500 to £4,500 per month for mid-market B2B retainers, and £4,500 to £8,500 per month for larger or more complex estates. Regulated sectors are commonly quoted 25–40% higher. Double W prices a Diagnostic at £2,500 one-off, Foundation at £3,500 per month on a six-month minimum, and Authority at £7,500 per month on a twelve-month minimum.
Structured on-page and schema changes can shift how an AI system describes a brand within weeks, because retrieval-based surfaces such as Google AI Overviews and Perplexity re-crawl frequently. Earned media citations, which account for the largest single share of AI citations, typically take one to two quarters to build. We report citation share monthly from month one, so movement is visible well before commercial impact lands.
No, and anyone who does is selling something they don't control. Answer engines are ranked retrieval systems with undisclosed weightings that change without notice. What we commit to is the input work, a measured baseline, monthly reporting against named competitors, and honest reporting when a surface moves against us. If citation share is not improving by month four on Foundation, we will tell you before you have to ask.
If we are going to argue that citation is the currency, we should show ours. All figures below link to the originating publisher, not to a summary of it.