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In 2026, asking “What does AEO services include?” is one of the most important questions a business can ask.
AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and DeepSeek aren’t just giving directions or summarising pages anymore, they’re becoming the primary places customers make decisions, compare brands, and even complete purchases.
Customers now:
Which means AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is no longer optional. It is the foundation of being chosen in a world where AI answers before users ever see search results.
Dean Whitby captured this shift better than anyone:
“Build a business AI can’t replace. Master the skills AI can’t commoditise.”
So let’s break down exactly what AEO services include today, and what brands truly need if they want AI to find them, trust them, cite them, and book them.
While AEO ensures your content is structured, answer-ready, and easy for AI to quote.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) ensures AI systems can understand, verify, and represent your brand accurately inside generative models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity.
AEO = “Make the answer easy to generate.”
GEO = “Make the AI confident in who you are.”
GEO focuses on:
AEO gets you visible. GEO makes you trustworthy, citeable, and recommendable.
Both are required for success in 2026.
Understanding AEO starts with understanding the modern buyer.
Recent behaviour shifts show:
Customers trust AI like a personalized advisor.
They aren’t just searching anymore.
They are asking, evaluating, and acting inside AI systems.
If your business isn’t optimised for AI, you’re invisible during the most important moment, the moment of decision.
Before we go deeper, here’s a short video from Dean Whitby on how AI is reshaping sales and marketing, it perfectly sets the context for everything in this guide.
As more customer journeys move into AI assistants and away from traditional search results, businesses are now operating in a zero-click environment.
To understand this shift deeper, here’s how brands win in a zero-click future.
Most people still think in terms of the old Google Knowledge Graph, but generative engines work completely differently.
Generative engines don’t just store facts; they build probabilistic, multi-source entity profiles.
If your entity is inconsistent, confused, or duplicated. AI becomes uncertain and avoids citing or recommending you.
If a business uses:
Then AI experiences Entity Confusion.
When this happens:
AI may exclude you entirely from answers
Fixing entity confusion is core to GEO.
This is where Entity Training comes in.
Generative engines must be trained consistently to recognise your business.
Entity Training includes:
1. Choosing ONE primary entity
The official brand identity AI should learn.
2. Reinforcing it everywhere
With:
3. Repetition across multiple trusted sources
Generative engines rely on cross-source consensus.
If everything aligns, AI becomes extremely confident in your identity.
High confidence = high citations.
GEO depends on consistent, uniform business data.
AI checks:
If your information differs between these sources, AI treats your business as unreliable.
Uniformity → Trust
Trust → Citations
Citations → Recommendations
Recommendations → Bookings
This consistency layer is mandatory for GEO success.
Most AEO services on the market stick to a familiar set of deliverables. They’re useful, valuable, and necessary, but incomplete for how AI works today.
Here’s what most AEO services include:
This usually includes:
The goal is to increase the chance of being quoted by an AI assistant.
This involves adding:
These make your content machine-readable.
AEO providers often optimise:
This helps AI understand what your brand is about.
This includes:
These help your content appear in direct answers.
This means:
These make it easier for AI to lift your content.
This involves:
This ensures AI systems can crawl your content reliably. These services are important, but they only check the “minimum visibility” box.
Brands need more than visibility inside AI. They need authority, evidence, community validation, and actionability.
As Dean Whitby puts it: “If AI can’t cite you, you don’t exist.”, and if customers can’t book you, you don’t convert.
These common components form the baseline of AEO, but real success requires a structured, strategic roadmap, something we outline in our AEO/GEO playbook for dominating AI search.
This is where most AEO services fall short.
AEO is no longer just content and schema.
To win inside AI ecosystems, brands need authority, evidence, community presence, and bookability.
This is where Tenacious delivers a higher tier of AEO, built for how AI assistants actually evaluate businesses.
YouTube is the most powerful form of machine-readable authority.
We launch and run full YouTube ecosystems:
Every video includes:
Why YouTube belongs in AEO:
Dean’s message reinforces this: “Your voice must be present and meaningful for AI to quote you.”
YouTube is that voice.
YouTube isn’t just a video platform, it’s one of the strongest authority signals for AI engines, especially when paired with strategic video production for visibility and trust.
We secure 5–6 quality PR features every month via journalist request platforms.
These become:
AI pays attention to reputable external sources, because they validate expertise. PR should be part of every serious AEO strategy.
AI models ingest Reddit heavily.
So companies should focus on:
This builds durable social proof, the type AI assistants prioritise in their reasoning.
This is where AEO meets conversion.
Rebuild pages with:
Plus:
These pages:
This is the glue that connects discovery → trust → purchase.
This is the most overlooked, yet most important, part of AEO in 2026.
Once AI recommends your business, customers must be able to book instantly.
Tenacious builds AI-powered agents that:
This is the future of conversion.
Not landing pages.
Not forms.
Not chat widgets.
AI assistants book directly, and we make your brand bookable.
This shift is already happening across industries, and we break it down fully in our guide on why websites are dead and agents are taking over.
AEO is essential for industries where customers plan or book before arriving, including:
If these brands are not present and bookable inside AI, they risk losing customers at the moment of intent.
Because Tenacious doesn’t just create content, we build full systems that make your business:
We understand the entire business ecosystem:
We don’t deliver blog bundles. We build the infrastructure AI needs to choose your brand.
AEO services include every element required for AI to:
This requires:
This is the complete, modern AEO ecosystem, and Tenacious AI Marketing is one of the few companies in the world able to build it end-to-end.
If you want your brand to:
Then Tenacious AI Marketing is your partner. Book a strategy call.
See your opportunities, become the brand AI recommends, every time.
If AI can’t cite you or book you, it can’t sell you. We make sure it can do both.
1. What does AEO services include?
AEO services include answer-optimised content, structured data, entity optimisation, YouTube authority assets, PR citations, Reddit community proof, enriched product/service pages, and AI booking systems that allow customers to book inside AI assistants.
2. Why is AEO important for businesses in 2026?
AEO is important because AI assistants are now the primary tools people use to ask questions, compare options, and make decisions. Without AEO, brands become invisible in AI-driven journeys.
3. Does AEO only involve writing content?
No. Content is only one part of AEO. It also includes schema, multimedia, PR authority, Reddit presence, product pages, technical structure, and booking automation.
4. How does YouTube help with AEO?
YouTube provides transcripts, long-form expertise, and machine-verifiable proof. AI uses YouTube content as a trust signal, making it easier to cite your brand.
5. What industries benefit most from AEO?
Restaurants, hospitality, clinics, dentists, wellness brands, tourism companies, and any business where customers plan or book before arriving benefit most from AEO.
6. Can AI assistants complete bookings directly?
Yes. AI can schedule appointments, take payments, and manage follow-up actions, if a brand integrates AI booking agents.
7. What is the difference between SEO and AEO?
SEO optimises for search engines. AEO optimises for AI assistants, requiring structured evidence, authority, schema, multimedia content, and bookable actions.
