AEO Websites
The next prospect won't Google you. They'll ask an AI who to hire.
That AI has already made up its mind about you, and it decided based on what it could read. Most websites it can't. We build sites that AI search engines read, cite, and recommend: fast, structured, and running on Groundwork, the same knowledge record your team and your agents already use.
Book a Working SessionAn AEO website answers the questions your buyers ask, on the page they'd land on, in structured data the models parse. It loads in under a second on a phone and carries an on-site AI in your voice.
Ask ChatGPT who does what you do in your market. See if you come up.
Run it across the engines your customers actually use. For most firms the answer is a competitor, a directory, or nothing. Not because the firm is worse. Because its website was built for a human with a mouse, and the thing reading it now is a model with no patience for a page that takes six seconds to load and buries what you do under a hero slider.
We run this baseline before every website engagement and put the results on page one of the proposal. It's the most useful thing a prospect learns from us before they've paid a dollar.
AI mentions you. AI recommends you. People talk about you.
The engine can find you and describe you accurately. That's structure: clean content, clear answers to the questions your buyers ask, schema the models read.
The engine puts you forward when someone asks who to hire. That's authority: proof, specificity, consistency across every page, and a site that says the same thing your other channels say.
Coverage, citations, and links from places the engines trust. The site can't manufacture this alone, but it can stop wasting it.
Fast enough that the machine reads the whole page. Clear enough that it understands it.
Loads in under a second on a phone
Most sites in your category take five to eight. That gap is where engines decide who ranks and where prospects leave before your name registers.
Every page written as an answer
Headers that make claims. Content structured so a model can pull a clean citation from it. The questions your buyers ask, answered on the page they'd land on.
An AI on the site that answers in your voice
A visitor asks "why you and not the other firm" and gets your answer, with your specifics, at eleven at night. It runs on the same Groundwork we build for your team, so it never freelances.
A lead tool built for your market
A home value estimator, a project readiness check, a cost calculator. Something a visitor uses, that turns a browser into a named contact.
Content that's yours, in an open format
Your site's content lives as structured, readable files, not inside a vendor's database. It's the same format your knowledge base and your agents run on, which is why a change to what's true about your company can propagate to all three.
When your position changes, the whole site changes with it.
The content and the design live apart, so a new position reaches every page the same day. It's built on your own stack, in files you own, with a design made for your firm.
A community site that ranks for searches it never paid for.
We built a dedicated site for Ben Olsen's practice in the Moraga Country Club community: plan-level sales data, a home value estimator, automated lead capture. Since June it's pulled 311 visitors: 126 from organic search, 42 from a postcard's QR code straight into the estimator, and four who arrived from ChatGPT. The estimator turns browsers into named leads inside the same CRM his revenue agent reads.
Read the Moraga Country Club case study →
Every proposal we send is one of these. Each one ships as a live site on the same stack we're recommending, with a live speed comparison against the prospect's current site and an AI that answers questions about the proposal in our voice. The proposal is the demo.
Test your site in five minutes.
Open the AI you use most. Ask it: "Who are the best [what you do] in [your market]?" Then ask it to describe your company.
Read what comes back. If it's wrong, vague, or someone else, that's what every prospect who asks is getting too.
It starts with a Working Session.
One conversation with your team about where you want AI to take the company, and what you're working with today. Where a website is in scope, we run the AI search baseline before we meet. It's step one of six, and the start of Discovery and Roadmap.
Book a Working SessionTell us about your work, and the people it's for.
Questions we get
What is an AEO website?
A site built so AI search engines (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google's AI answers) can read it, cite it accurately, and recommend it. Answer engine optimization is to AI search what SEO was to Google.
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. It sits on top of it. A fast, well-structured site helps both. What changes is the content: it has to answer questions directly, because that's what gets cited.
How fast does the site need to be?
Under a second on a phone is the target. Most WordPress sites in professional services take five to eight seconds, which is long enough for both the engine and the visitor to move on.
Can we keep our current CMS?
We build on our own stack. The point of the build is that your content lives in structured, portable files your team, your website, and your AI tools all read from, and that starts with the foundation. Where you own other surfaces (landing pages, program sites, a proposal system), we build those on the same foundation and connect them.
What does the on-site AI actually do?
It answers visitor questions in your voice from your approved knowledge. It doesn't invent facts, quote prices you haven't set, or make commitments.
How do we know it's working?
We run the same AI search baseline before launch and after, and the site reports what visitors do, including which pages get read and which leads came from where.