When AI recommends who to buy from, your competitor gets named. Do you?
We get you into the top 5 answers — on ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.
Answer Engine Optimization for companies that intend to outgrow their category, not just appear in it.
See who AI names
Three engines · one questionNot on this list? That’s the deal you never hear about.
Find out why — start the AuditFree AI Visibility Audit
Send your website. A person on the 360 team works out what you sell, writes the five buyer questions your category is actually searched with, runs them on ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, and sends you the report.
- Where you stand today on all three engines, in writing
- The competitors currently holding your shortlist places
- What those answers are citing, and what you’re missing
- A straight go / no-go read on the top-5 promise for your category
What happens next: a named consultant runs it by hand and emails your report within 1 business day. We cap how many we take each week so that stays true.
We will get you into the top 5 of AI answers for your category.
Not “improve your visibility”. Not “help you show up”. A position, on a list, that you can check yourself.
What top 5 means for your business
You get shortlisted instead of skipped
A named position puts you in front of buyers who were never going to find you. That is new revenue, not redistributed revenue.
Enquiries that arrive already warm
Someone who reaches you because AI recommended you has been pre-sold by a source they trust, and argues less on price.
Demand you currently cannot see
Deals lost inside an AI answer never appear in your CRM as lost — a position converts invisible demand into pipeline you can forecast.
Growth that keeps working when the ad budget pauses, because the position isn’t rented. See exactly how we measure it ↓
If AI doesn’t name you, your competitor gets the deal
A page of links gave a buyer ten options and let them choose. An answer gives them three to five and calls it the shortlist. If you’re not in that set, you are not competing for the deal.
One question. Five names. You’re either on the list or you aren’t.
The whole business case in one screen. A buyer types a category question, an answer engine returns a handful of vendors, and the shortlist is set — before anyone visits a website or fills in a form.
Illustrative. Invented vendors, invented category — not a real answer from any engine.
“Best youth mentoring nonprofits in Oakland”
Illustrative example — invented names, not a live AI answer.
- 1 Northline Mentors Co
- 2 Quill & Compass Youth
- 3 Redwood Practice Labs
- 4 Cedarline Guides LLC
- 5 Mapstone Mentoring Group
Your company isn’t here. The buyer never learns that it exists.
What’s already changed
Figures as reported in Digital Applied’s 2026 AI search round-up (April 2026), aggregating BrightEdge and Ahrefs data. Every number on this page carries a source.
Ten links become five names
Every buyer question that used to produce a page of options now produces a handful of recommendations.
You aren’t in the room
The shortlist forms during research, before anyone fills in a form or takes a call.
Being cited makes you more citable
Companies that get named accumulate the references that make them easier to name next time.
What is Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)?
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of becoming the source the answer names — the company that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini cite and recommend when buyers ask who to buy from.
Search used to end with a page of links you could work your way down. An answer ends with a short list of names. AEO is the work of getting your company onto that list.
| SEO | GEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page | Appear in generated text | Be named and cited as the answer |
| Unit of success | A position | A mention | A place on a short list of vendors |
| What moves it | Links, keywords, page speed | Phrasing and structure | Entity clarity, verifiable claims, citable structure, corroboration |
| How you measure | Rank tracking | Share of mentions | Repeated prompt runs across named engines |
SEO still works, and we don’t ask anyone to stop doing it. But SEO gets you a link — AEO gets you named, and being named is what puts you on the shortlist a buyer is already choosing from.
Who this is for
The test isn’t whether you sell to consumers or to businesses. It’s whether your category has a name a buyer would say out loud.
Consumer brands
B2C is often the easier win — high-intent shortlist questions people now ask AI instead of opening ten tabs.
B2B product companies
Categories buyers research before they buy, where a shortlist place decides whether you get the enquiry at all.
Teams running paid ads
AEO runs alongside your ad spend as a hedge — the position keeps working when the budget pauses.
Teams already investing in SEO
You have the content library. AEO makes it citable rather than replacing it.
We work across nonprofits, colleges and universities, mortgage, legal, solar and home security, healthcare, financial services and real estate.
How we measure it, precisely
The business case is above. This is the specification the promise is enforced against — written down before you sign.
What top 5 means
Measurement specificationThe Top-5 Sprint Method
Four steps, in this order, every time. The first one happens before you pay us anything.
Visibility check
We run your category questions across the three engines and record who gets named, how often, and where you appear.
You get: your baseline, in writing.
Competitor gap
We trace what the engines cite when they name your competitors: which sources, which claims, which corroboration you’re missing.
You get: the named gap between you and the shortlist.
Top-5 sprint
We fix the entity layer, the claim layer and the citation layer — schema, definitions, comparisons, corroboration.
You get: the work, shipped, on your site.
Re-measure
Same questions, same method, same engines. We report movement per question, including what hasn’t moved.
You get: a monthly scorecard you can check yourself.
Positions decay. That’s not a sales tactic — it’s how these systems work
A top-5 position is not a trophy you win once. Three forces move it, none under your control.
Models get retrained
A new model version reads the web afresh. Categories reshuffle overnight, and nothing you did caused it.
Competitors respond
The vendor publishing comparison content and earning third-party mentions this quarter is the one named next quarter.
Your own sources go stale
Review profiles age, round-ups get rewritten without you, product claims drift out of date.
This is the entire argument for the Retainer, stated plainly: the Sprint gets you the position, and holding it is separate, ongoing work.
Three ways to start
Start with the Audit. It costs you two form fields and tells you whether the category is worth fighting for.
AI Visibility Audit
Best for: “show me I’m invisible.”
- Baseline on all three engines we measure
- Competitor citation map for your category
- Prioritised gap list — entity, claims, citations
- A go / no-go read on the top-5 promise
No charge. A named consultant sends your report within 1 business day.
Start the free AuditTop-5 Sprint
Best for: “get me on the list.”
- Everything in the Audit
- Entity and schema layer built on your site
- Citable assets: definitions, comparisons, proof pages
- Third-party corroboration programme
- Monthly re-measurement against the agreed questions
The engagement that gets you onto the list, with the promise and the measurement attached.
Request pricingAEO Retainer
Best for: “don’t let me lose it.”
- Continuous monitoring as engines and models change
- New question sets as your categories expand
- Content and entity maintenance
- Quarterly category review with your team
Holds the top-5 position after the Sprint has won it — against the three forces above.
Request pricingHow we work
A named team, a fixed set of questions, and a report you can check against the engines yourself. No black box.
These are ranges, not padding. A narrow, well-defined category moves through the build in weeks; a broad one contested by incumbents takes longer.
Baseline and scope
We agree the category, write the five buyer questions with you, and measure where you stand today on all three engines.
Gap analysis and plan
We map what the engines cite when they name your competitors, and turn the difference into a prioritised, costed plan.
Build
Entity and schema work, citable content, comparison and proof assets, and the corroboration programme — shipped on your site.
Measure and report
Same questions, same method. A scorecard per question, per engine, with movement and variance shown honestly.
What we need from you
Short list, and worth knowing before you enquire — AEO is work on your site, not work about your site.
Somewhere to ship
CMS or staging access, or a developer on your side who can deploy what we hand over.
Someone who can sign off claims
One person who can confirm a claim is true and approve it going public.
A couple of hours a month
Kickoff to agree the five questions, then a monthly read of the scorecard.
What you get
Things we hand over
- A written baseline report across the three engines
- Your fixed, agreed set of buyer questions
- A competitor citation map for your category
- The entity and schema layer, built and live on your site
- Citable assets — definitions, comparisons, proof pages
- A monthly scorecard, per question and per engine
What it’s for
- A place on the shortlist when buyers ask AI who to buy from
- Citations you can point at, in answers you can reproduce
- Category presence that compounds instead of resetting each month
- A content and entity system your team can keep running
- Evidence for your board that the shift to AI answers is covered
Why buy AEO from 360
Four reasons, and none of them is a logo. Judge us on the method, because the method is the only thing you can check before you spend anything.
850+ certified engineers and fourteen years of shipped implementation work sit behind the build phase. That’s evidence we can execute — it is not evidence of AEO outcomes.
The baseline comes before the quote
We won’t price an engagement until we’ve run your questions and seen the category.
The work lands on your site
Built and deployed by our own delivery team — not handed over as a slide deck.
Our own products compete in contested categories
We run this method on ourselves first, in categories where we can be outranked.
Questions, method and variance in the open
You can reproduce any number we report.
We ran it on ourselves. Here’s where we win and where we don’t
AEO is a new service line, so we won’t show you client results we don’t have. What we can show you is our own scorecard, including the category where we sit outside the top 5.
Our own position · checked 12 September 2026
Our position in ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
This row will carry our own measured position on the three engines, with the exact questions, the date, the number of runs and the variance — published whether it flatters us or not.
Client results block
Reserved for AEO case studies, client logos and named quotes. Nothing goes in here until real ones exist.
Frequently asked questions
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of becoming the source the answer names — the company that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini cite and recommend when buyers ask who to buy from. Where SEO competes for a position on a page of links, AEO competes for a place on the short list of vendors an answer actually names.
SEO ranks a page. GEO aims for a mention inside generated text. AEO aims for something narrower and more commercial: being named as one of the vendors an answer recommends. AEO does not replace SEO, and we don’t ask anyone to stop doing it.
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Those three are named in your engagement, and the promise is scored against them — so what you see on this page is what the engagement is measured on.
Because we measure your baseline before we quote, and we only take the engagement when the category is winnable. The exact pass condition is written into the engagement — see “What top 5 means” above.
We are equally clear about what we don’t control: answer engines are non-deterministic, and a model update can reshuffle a category. That is why the promise is defined as a measured position held across two consecutive months.
The Audit: your baseline report is emailed within 1 business day of you sending your website.
The Sprint: a separate, longer piece of work. The build runs a matter of weeks depending on the state of your site and the width of your category.
It’s free, and the catch is capacity rather than money: a named consultant runs it by hand, so we cap how many we take each week.
A member of the 360 Degree Cloud team confirms your category and the questions worth measuring, then runs your Audit and emails the report within 1 business day. There is no checkout and no automated sequence.
The Audit costs nothing. Sprint and Retainer pricing depends on the width of your category, the number of questions and the state of your site, so we quote after the Audit rather than before it.
