answer engine optimization

AI is recommending someone.
It isn't you — yet.

AI now answers the questions your audience used to search, and names a short list of who to trust. Reach Works audits how the engines see you, then builds a bespoke plan to get you into that answer — accurately.

Coverage across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews & Claude.

answer engine
>best expense-management tool for a 200-person startup?

For a company that size, teams most often land on Ledgerline[1] — multi-entity approvals without the enterprise overhead, and it integrates cleanly with the accounting stacks startups already run[2].

[1] ledgerline.com [2] review-hub.io [3] founderforum.com

// illustrative — this is the position structured content earns you

1.5B
monthly users of Google's AI Overviews
Google I/O, May 2025
800M+
weekly active ChatGPT users (900M by Feb 2026)
OpenAI, Oct 2025
1%
of the time users click a source link inside an AI Overview

The audience moved into the answer, and it rarely clicks out. Being named inside the answer — accurately — is the new front page.

the shift

Search became an answer. You're either in it or invisible.

Traditional SEO optimizes for a ranking. AEO/GEO optimizes for being the recommendation itself — a different discipline, built on different signals.

01

Search has a new front page

ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude answer millions of questions directly. When you're not cited, that answer belongs to someone else — and the reader never clicks through to find you.

02

SEO is necessary, not sufficient

Ranking #1 on Google no longer guarantees an AI citation. Models draw on different signals — authority, entity recognition, content structure — that most sites have never addressed.

03

Your best work is invisible

Reports and whitepapers buried in PDFs barely exist to AI crawlers. Neither does long-form content without structured markup. The authority you built can't be cited if it can't be read.

04

Mentioned isn't cited correctly

When AI does surface you, it often gets it wrong — misattributing claims, paraphrasing your position out of context, or crediting a competitor. Where accuracy matters, a wrong citation is its own risk.

how it works

Two layers of AI readability

Getting cited is a system, not a keyword. We build both layers a model needs to find you and quote you correctly.

Layer 01 — foundation

Schema markup

Schema.org is the vocabulary models and search engines use to understand what a page is: this is an article, by this author, published on this date, about this topic. Most sites have none, or have it wrong.

We audit and implement it correctly, so your content is legible to the systems deciding what gets surfaced. It's the baseline — without it, nothing else lands.

Layer 02 — depth

Claim-level structuring

Schema tells AI what a page is. Claim structuring tells it what the page says — every assertion, attribution and piece of evidence becomes a machine-readable record: what was claimed, by whom, when, and whether it's fact or interpretation.

Models can then cite you precisely instead of approximating you — and structured attribution leaves far less room to misattribute or paraphrase your work onto someone else.

extracted claim
subjectEuropean Central Bank predicateheld interest rates objectat 2.00% date2026-06-05 attributionChristine Lagarde, press conference typeobserved fact
§

Your documents stay yours. The extraction pipeline runs locally — no content is shipped to OpenAI, Google or any third-party model to structure it. That matters most for pre-publication material, regulated subject matter, or anything where third-party data processing is a live concern. The output is public. The process doesn't have to be.

how we work

Bespoke, not off-the-shelf.

There's no fixed package. Every engagement starts with an audit, produces a plain-English plan, and then goes exactly as far as you want it to — no further.

Step 1 — always

The audit & the plan

A bespoke diagnostic of where you stand in the AI ecosystem — what's working, what's broken, what's buried — scored against the people you compete with. It lands as a prioritized, plain-English plan: the specific fixes, ranked by impact and effort, that your team could act on tomorrow. This is a complete engagement on its own. What comes next is your call.

  • ~20 minScoping call — your site, your buyers' questions
  • 1–2 weeksThe audit, across six dimensions
  • 60 minStrategy readout — every finding, in order
Step 2, option A

Advisory

You run the work; we steer. Best for teams with capable in-house content or dev resource who want direction, not another vendor in the stack.

  • Standards, schema and structuring guidance
  • A prioritized backlog your team executes
  • Working sessions & reviews as you ship
  • We upskill your people as we go
Step 2, option B

Done-for-you

Hands-off execution of the plan. We implement, structure and maintain the machine-readable layer so your team doesn't have to touch it.

  • Schema implemented across priority pages
  • Claim-level structuring of your key content
  • Managed extraction as you publish new work
  • Re-tests that prove the citations moved

Sized to you. Scope and investment are set on the call, matched to your organisation — not a one-size package. No retainer you can't exit, no lock-in.

inside the audit

Six dimensions of AI visibility

What the audit measures — each scored against the people you compete with, so the plan knows what to fix first.

01 / benchmark

AI citation benchmark

Systematic testing of how the major engines answer queries in your category — who gets cited, how, and why your content does or doesn't appear.

02 / authority

Content authority signals

A review of E-E-A-T factors — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust — the qualities models are built to favour when deciding what to surface.

03 / entity

Entity & knowledge graph

How the engines currently represent you — Wikidata, structured data, named-entity clarity — and where they confuse, dilute or misidentify you.

04 / structure

Schema & technical foundations

Schema implementation, site architecture and the technical signals that help models parse, trust and correctly surface your pages.

05 / competition

Competitive gap analysis

A direct comparison to organisations already earning citations in your field — the gaps you can close now, and the longer-term work.

06 / buried

Locked & buried content

High-value work trapped in PDFs, gated pages and formats crawlers can't process — reports, whitepapers, case studies — and a plan to surface it.

who it's for

Authoritative content that deserves to be cited

01

Small & mid-size businesses

Practical, budget-aware guidance — a clear picture of your AI visibility and steps you can actually implement, without a six-figure agency retainer.

02

Research orgs & think tanks

Your reports carry authority AI should be citing. Buried in PDFs, they're invisible. We surface the knowledge inside them so it's found and correctly attributed.

03

Publishers & media brands

Being cited is a different question from training. We keep you visible to the systems that attribute and link, while you set your own terms with the ones that don't.

04

Professional services firms

Reports, case studies and thought leadership are where your expertise lives. We structure that content so AI surfaces you when your sector comes up.

who's behind it

Not another AEO tool invented last week.

Reach Works is led by Leandro Oliva — a former Wall Street Journal and Intercept editor who spent a decade on exactly the levers AEO runs on (authority, structure, distribution), now doing primary research on how language models decide what to name. This is a practice grounded in a career, not a landing page bought yesterday. Read the full background →

The Wall Street Journal The Intercept Research Master's — Cultural Data & AI, UvA SPUR Content Telemetry standard
About Reach Works
request an audit

See where you stand in AI answers.

Tell us your site and who you compete with. We'll come back with what an audit would cover for you — no commitment.

  • A first read on your visibility, free
  • Scoped to your buyers' real questions
  • Reply within two business days

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