AI Hub
AI Search Hub: how to be found and cited by AI
Plain, sourced guides on answer engine optimisation for UK businesses. How AI assistants find, choose and quote websites, and what you can do about it. No guarantees, no hype.
01 — Overview
What this hub covers
People increasingly receive a written answer before they visit any website. This hub explains how those answers are built, and how a business can make its content clear, accurate and easy to quote.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) builds on search engine optimisation. It adds answer-first writing, passage-level clarity and a consistent business identity, so that Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and similar tools can use your pages as sources. It improves the odds of being cited. It cannot guarantee a citation, and we say so in every guide.
Every article follows the same pattern: a direct answer first, supporting context, tables where they help, and FAQs. We link to primary sources such as Google Search Central, OpenAI, schema.org and llmstxt.org so you can check the claims yourself.
02 — Start here
A suggested reading path
New to the subject? Read these in order. Each takes about ten minutes.
What is answer engine optimisation?
The definition, the main AI answer engines and the first steps for a business.
AEO vs SEO
What overlaps, what differs and how to prioritise.
How AI Overviews choose sources
What Google says about eligibility and query fan-out.
Measuring AI search visibility
How to track progress honestly.
03 — Foundations
Understand how AI search works
Definitions, platform behaviour and the thinking behind topic coverage.
Foundations
What is answer engine optimisation?
A clear definition of AEO, how it works and where a UK business should begin.
Read the AEO definitionFoundations
AEO vs SEO
A side-by-side comparison and a practical order of work.
Compare AEO and SEOFoundations
How AI Overviews choose sources
Eligibility, query fan-out and what Google says you do not need.
See how AI Overviews pick sourcesFoundations
How ChatGPT finds and cites websites
OpenAI’s crawlers, robots.txt choices and tracking referral visits.
Learn how ChatGPT cites sitesFoundations
Topical authority explained
Plan connected coverage so your site answers the whole subject.
Understand topical authority04 — Optimisation
Make your site easier to quote
The technical and editorial work that supports AI visibility.
Optimisation
llms.txt guide
What the proposed file is, what the evidence says and whether to add one.
Read the llms.txt guideOptimisation
Schema markup for AI search
Where structured data helps and where it does not.
Read the schema markup guideOptimisation
AI content quality checklist
What to verify before publishing AI-assisted content.
Use the content quality checklistOptimisation
Entity SEO for UK businesses
Make your business clearly identifiable to search and AI systems.
Read the entity SEO guide05 — Measurement
Track what is happening
Honest measurement for a field where answers vary.
Measurement
Measuring AI search visibility
Prompt tracking, referral analytics and how to avoid overstating results.
Learn to measure AI visibility06 — Glossary
Terms you will meet
A short glossary. A fuller version will follow as the hub grows.
- AEO
- Answer engine optimisation: structuring content so it can be quoted in answers.
- Query fan-out
- Running several related searches to answer one question.
- Entity
- A clearly identifiable thing, such as a business, person or place.
- Citation
- A link or named reference to a source within an AI answer.
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