Frequently asked questions

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of getting your company cited and recommended by AI engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews when buyers ask them to recommend suppliers. Unlike traditional SEO, which optimizes for Google's ranked links, AEO optimizes for AI-generated answers, where buyers increasingly begin their research before they ever visit a website.

SEO works to rank your pages in Google's list of links. AEO works to make your business the answer AI gives: named, cited as a source, and described accurately. It optimizes your whole online presence (content, schema, third-party citations, and review signals) around how AI engines read, trust, and quote you. Strong content helps both; they optimize for different moments.

Yes. Buyers now start vendor research with AI, and most of the buying journey happens before they ever contact a salesperson, which means the shortlist is often set before you'd traditionally get a chance to compete. If AI doesn't surface and recommend you at that stage, you don't lose the deal in the room; you lose it before the conversation ever starts. That cost is invisible, and it tends to compound every month you're absent.

AI engines tend to reinforce the brands they already cite: today's citations tend to become tomorrow's, as models increasingly train on and retrieve their own prior outputs. Every month a competitor invests in AEO and you don't, the gap widens and gets harder to close. Buyers are already using AI to research suppliers; waiting means losing deals you'll never know existed.

A comprehensive AI Visibility Audit that shows where you stand, why, and how to fix; a step-by-step execution kit for each fix that we help you implement; and ongoing monitoring and optimization. You get the diagnosis, the fixes, and the follow-through.

Javvo optimizes your visibility across the AI engines your customers actually use: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Together these account for the overwhelming majority of consumer AI search, with ChatGPT leading the category by a wide margin. We test on the live engines, several times each, since AI answers vary between runs. If your buyers rely on another engine, we'll gladly add it. Tracking every AI engine, as many tools claim to, mostly adds noise and skews the results.

Our comprehensive AI Visibility Audit measures how you show up in AI answers against your competitors. We test around 50 high-intent buyer prompts across the engines your customers use, then measure your citation rate, sentiment score, and how you perform on each question type, by engine. We also run an in-depth audit across the five areas that drive AI recommendations: Technical Readiness, Content Optimization, Data Integrity, Brand Defense, and Source Authority. Then we turn those insights into a prioritized action plan built to improve your standing and produce real results. Download our sample AI Visibility Audit report →

Most tools hand you a dashboard and leave the work to you. Javvo delivers the full service at a competitive price, and every engagement is human-reviewed. We build the complete picture: where you stand, why, and how to fix it, and we help you put it in place.

Usually, yes. Most outdated sites can be optimized with schema markup, content rewrites, and structured FAQs, with no full rebuild required. If your site's architecture genuinely can't support modern schema (typically only the oldest custom-built or proprietary CMS sites), we'll tell you honestly and recommend a rebuild first. We won't sell you AEO work that can't deliver.

Ongoing. AI engines refresh their training and retrieval data constantly, your competitors keep adding new content and citations, and engines that use retrieval tend to favor fresher sources. AEO tends to compound with consistent monthly effort. The companies that win long-term are the ones that never stop.

AI citations tend to begin shifting within 60–90 days of the fixes being put in place, appearing in answers where you weren't surfaced before. Because AEO tends to compound (engines that cite you tend to keep citing you), that visibility builds over time. Timelines vary by industry and starting point.

Javvo offers a one-time AI Visibility Audit, execution packages, and different tiers of ongoing monitoring and optimization plans. See our pricing page for details →