AEO is SEO on steroids. What to fix now to show up .
Zero-click search is becoming the default search experience. Here's what that means for how B2B brands write.
Last updated 10 July 2026
SEO (search engine optimisation) is the practice of structuring a page so search engines rank it highly for a relevant query. Important for brand discovery and authority.
AEO (answer engine optimisation) is the same practice applied to systems that answer a query directly, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, often without sending a click to any page at all.
The click is disappearing
Zero-click search is becoming the default search experience. Here's what that means for how B2B brands write.
Last updated: 10 July 2026
SEO (search engine optimisation) is the practice of structuring a page so search engines rank it highly for a relevant query. It matters for brand discovery and authority.
AEO (answer engine optimisation) is the same practice applied to systems that answer a query directly, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, often without sending a click to any page at all.
The click is disappearing
Brand discovery is being turned upside down by LLMs. A randomised field experiment by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Indian School of Business found that when Google's AI Overviews appear on a search, outbound organic clicks fall by 39.8%.
Separately, research from SparkToro, drawing on Similarweb's clickstream panel, found that 68.01% of all US Google searches in the first four months of 2026 ended without a click at all, and up to 77% on mobile devices.
This isn't a Google problem alone. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are increasingly the first place a B2B buyer asks "who does X" or "what's the difference between Y and Z".
None of these engines send a click before they've already formed an answer. Increasingly, the AI's summary is the pitch, and the website plays a key role in how that gets formed.
What these engines actually read
AI answer engines extract the first one or two sentences of a page to decide whether it resolves the query. If that opening is throat-clearing, background, or a mission statement, the engine moves on to a competitor's page that got to the point faster.
Most B2B "About" pages open like this: "Founded in 2019, we've always believed that great products deserve great stories." An AI engine extracting that sentence learns nothing it can cite.
Compare it with: "Studio Krama is a brand and strategy studio that helps growth-phase companies simplify complexity and build standout brands." The second version works even if a bot quotes only that line, because the line already contains the answer.
Structured data decides whether you get quoted at all
FAQPage schema, direct Q&A formatting and clearly labelled sections aren't SEO housekeeping. They're essential directions for how these systems construct responses.
A page with a clean, structured question and a self-contained answer is far more likely to be lifted whole into an AI-generated response than a page that buries the same fact three paragraphs into a blog post.
Freshness matters too, and not equally across engines. Ahrefs analysed 17 million AI citations and found that AI assistants cite content that is, on average, 25.7% more recently updated than the pages Google's organic results surface, with Perplexity showing a measurable preference for newer content specifically.
A page with no visible update date gives an engine nothing to weigh in its favour.
Name yourself, every time
Generic brand copy leans on "we" throughout. That works for a human reading the whole page, because they've already seen the company name in the header.
It fails for an AI engine, which might extract a single sentence with no surrounding context.
"We help scale-ups build standout brands" loses its subject the moment it's lifted out of the page. "Studio Krama helps scale-ups build standout brands" keeps it.
How to fix it
Four changes carry most of the weight, and none of them need an SEO specialist or a rebuild.
Rewrite the first sentence of your homepage, About page and Service pages. Each one should name the company and state what it does, in one sentence, before anything else. If a reader or a bot sees only that line, it should already be a complete answer.
Add an FAQ page, and ensure it has a proper FAQPage schema. If a page lists questions informally, even in a "Common questions" section, mark it up properly. It’s a quick developer task measured in hours, and it's the clearest single signal an answer engine reads.
Put a visible, accurate "last updated" date on every evergreen page, and only move it when the content genuinely changes. A stale date left on old content signals less to an engine than no date at all.
Replace "we" with the company name in the opening line of every section, not the whole page, just the first sentence, the part most likely to get lifted out on its own.
Work through the highest-traffic pages against that list first. The homepage and the pages ranking for branded search carry the most weight in what an engine ends up citing.
Vague positioning always comes with a cost. In an AI world, it's detrimental.
AI citation optimisation is not a technical SEO afterthought bolted onto marketing. It rewards exactly the same clarity that makes a value proposition land with a human investor or buyer.
A brand that can write one sentence stating what it does and for whom is the same brand whose sentence survives being lifted out of context by a machine. The cost of hedged, generic positioning used to surface slowly, as a vague brand that buyers half-remembered.
Now it surfaces immediately, as a sentence no AI engine can cite with confidence, and a competitor's sharper sentence in its place.
Studio Krama positions, writes for and creates websites for brands to ensure they stay visible in AI Discovery. Book a call see how we can help.
Sources: Agarwal, S. and Sen, A., "The Impact of Google AI Overviews on Publisher Traffic and User Experience: Evidence from a Field Experiment", SSRN; Fishkin, R., "In 2026, Less Than One Third of Google Searches Still Send a Click", SparkToro, data from Similarweb; Law, R. and Guan, X., "New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite 'Fresher' Content (17 Million Citations Analyzed)", Ahrefs
