When your customers ask AI,
be the answer.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of improving how often and how accurately a brand appears in AI-generated answers, such as those from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews. Where traditional SEO works to rank pages in a list of links, AEO focuses on the signals that help AI systems discover, understand, and reference a business when someone asks a question. For Differentiate Marketing, that means auditing current visibility, clarifying how a brand is described across the web, and building the owned and third-party evidence AI systems tend to draw on.

AI systems generate recommendations from patterns in the content they can access, including a brand’s own website, its structured data, and how the brand is described and discussed across third-party sources. No one can see or control the exact reasoning behind an individual AI recommendation, and results vary by question, by engine, and over time. What can be influenced are the underlying signals: clear and consistent information about who you are, machine-readable content, and credible third-party coverage. Differentiate Marketing focuses on strengthening those signals rather than claiming to control the models themselves.

AEO Authority, including PR and organic social, is $10,000 per month over a six-month engagement. At that level, Differentiate Marketing runs the complete system: AI visibility benchmarking, website and entity optimization, comparison content, and the earned media and organic social content that build your third-party authority. If you want to start with a smaller budget, AEO Foundations is $4,500, a one-time project covering the full audit and competitor research, the entity-clarity workshop, and a prioritized set of website optimizations, with PR and organic social added later through AEO Authority. PR and organic social are an essential part of competing most effectively in AI search, which is why they are built into AEO Authority rather than treated as an optional add-on.

For a six-month program, we run a full audit at the start of month one, the end of month three, and the end of month six. Each audit tracks a consistent set of commercially relevant questions, competitor mentions, and cited sources across major AI search platforms. Because AI answers vary by question and over time, we focus on measurable movement in visibility, not guaranteed rankings.

AEO is most useful for consumer brands whose customers research and shop by asking AI tools, and who want to understand and improve how often their brand is recommended in those answers. It fits brands whose customers compare options before they buy, where being named in the shortlist shapes the sale. Differentiate Marketing starts every engagement with an AI visibility benchmark, so you can see where your brand stands today before deciding whether a full AEO Authority program makes sense.

We partner with established brands and specialist businesses that already invest in marketing and want to strengthen their visibility in AI-powered discovery. Our focus includes health, performance, and longevity, but we also work with businesses in other categories where recommendations, comparisons, and brand credibility influence purchasing decisions.