Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of making a business the one that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI answers recommend when someone asks a question, by publishing clear facts about who you are, where you are, what you sell and what it costs, in a form those systems can read and trust.
A growing share of "which agency / clinic / rental company should I use in Dubai" questions are now asked to an AI assistant instead of typed into Google. The assistant answers with three to five names. AEO is how you become one of them.
How AI answers choose who to recommend
From what the engines publish and from testing prompts every month, the pattern is consistent:
- They lean on lists. "Best X in Dubai" articles, directories such as Clutch, Sortlist, DesignRush and GoodFirms, and review platforms are cited far more than company homepages.
- They want a clear entity. One name, one phone, one address and one licence number that match across your site, Google Business Profile and every directory.
- They quote pages that answer a question in the first paragraph, with a price or a number in it.
- They read structured data (schema.org) and plain-text files like llms.txt that state the facts without the design.
- They prefer pages that already rank and load fast, so classic SEO still underpins all of it.
SEO versus AEO
| SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank on the results page | Be named in the answer |
| Unit | A page for a keyword | A fact about an entity |
| Signals | Links, content, speed, intent | Consistency, citations in lists, schema, clear Q&A |
| Measure | Rankings, clicks | Mentions across prompts, referrals from AI tools |
A five-step AEO checklist for a Dubai business
- Write the entity statement. On your homepage and About page: who you are, legal name and licence, where you serve, what you sell, from what price, in two sentences.
- Publish prices and answers. A pricing page with real numbers and a visible FAQ, marked up with FAQPage schema.
- Make the facts machine-readable. Organization, Service and Person schema; an llms.txt file; a sitemap; Open Graph previews.
- Match everything off-site. Google Business Profile, Clutch, Sortlist, DesignRush, GoodFirms, LinkedIn: same name, phone, address, description. Collect reviews.
- Get into the lists. Pitch the authors of "best in Dubai" articles and publish an honest one yourself that includes competitors; this format is what the engines cite.
What this looks like in practice
This site is built the way we build for clients: an entity statement on the homepage, a pricing page with published packages and ten FAQs, one page per service and per industry, a schema graph naming the company, founders, services and prices, an llms.txt and llms-full.txt for AI crawlers, real 404s and a sitemap, with the same name and phone everywhere. It is an ordinary static site that loads fast; the difference is that every fact is stated once, plainly, and repeated consistently.
We build this for Dubai businesses alongside websites and AI tools: AI platforms, websites and SEO/AEO
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