Guides

Answer engine optimisation is not SEO

A site can be technically excellent, accessible, fast, fully crawlable, and still never be named in an answer. The two jobs overlap less than the tooling suggests.

What the two have in common

Both want pages a machine can fetch and read. Both are hurt by content that exists only after JavaScript runs, by facts trapped in images, and by sites that never say plainly what they do or where they do it. If you fix those things you have helped both jobs at once, and that is the genuine overlap.

Where they part company

Search ranks documents and shows you a list. An assistant composes an answer and names a handful of businesses inside it. Ranking tenth on a results page still puts you on the page. Being the eleventh most relevant business to an assistant puts you nowhere at all, because there is no second page of an answer. That difference is not a matter of degree.

Why a readiness scanner can pass you

Most tools that advertise AI readiness are measuring whether an AI crawler can reach and parse your site. That is a real and useful thing to check, and it is not the same as asking whether an assistant actually names you. A site can score well on every readiness measure ever devised and go unmentioned, because readiness is a property of your site and being recommended is a property of the answer.

The test that matters is the outcome

The only way to find out whether assistants name you is to ask them, with questions that do not contain your name, and to record what comes back. Everything else is a proxy. Proxies are useful when the outcome is expensive to measure, but when the outcome can be measured directly, a proxy is just a less accurate answer with more confidence attached to it.

Do both, in the right order

Fix the readable surface first, because it is cheap, it is within your control and it helps search as well. Then measure the outcome, because that is the thing your customers actually experience. Treating the first job as though it were the second is the mistake the current generation of tooling encourages, and it is the reason sites with excellent audit scores still wonder why the phone stopped ringing.