What is answer engine optimisation (AEO)?

Why is there no page two in an AI answer?

People have started asking AI tools the questions they used to type into Google: "best physio for runners in Brisbane", "how much does a kitchen renovation cost on the Gold Coast", "is it worth getting a bookkeeper for a cafe". The AI reads a handful of pages and writes an answer. If your page is one of the handful, you are named in the answer. If it is not, you are not in the conversation, and there is no page two to be found on.

For a local business this is mostly good news. An AI answering a question about your suburb and your trade has few pages to choose from, and a clear one wins. The bad news is that a vague page, a brochure with no facts, is invisible to an answer engine, because there is nothing in it to quote.

What do answer engines look for?

Google's own guidance for its AI features says there is nothing special to do beyond what already made a page useful (Google Search Central, 2024), and the evidence so far agrees. The pages that get quoted share a shape:

• The question is the heading and the answer is the first sentence, written to make sense on its own.
• Facts, names and numbers rather than adjectives. "Open 7 days, 6:00 am to 2:00 pm, car park behind the shop" gets quoted. "Conveniently located" does not.
• One page per question. A page that tries to answer ten things is quoted for none of them.
• The same facts everywhere: the website, the Google Business Profile, the social profiles. The engines trust what is said the same way in several places.
• A named author with a real history, and a date the page was last updated.

How does a physio become the answer? (example figures)

A physio in Brisbane wants to be the answer to "best physio for runners in Brisbane". Today the website has a Services page that lists twelve conditions and says the team is "passionate about movement".

The change is one new page. The heading is "Physio for runners in Brisbane". The first sentence says what the clinic does for runners, where it is and what a first visit costs: "We treat running injuries at our Paddington clinic, with a 45-minute first assessment at $120 and gait analysis on a treadmill." Below it, the three injuries the clinic sees most, what the first visit involves, how many runners it saw last year, and the practitioner's name and running history. The Google Business Profile gets the same facts, and so does the clinic's Instagram bio.

Nothing on that page is clever. It is specific, and an engine can lift any sentence of it. The clinic's existing Services page could not be quoted for anything.

How does Cora help write those pages?

When a strategy in your CoraVision plan is to be found for a question in your town, the tactics under it are pages like the one above, and Cora talks you through writing them on your own website, in Shopify, WordPress, Webflow or Framer, with the specialist for that platform in pill mode. Once Google Analytics 4 is connected, CoraVision reads where your visitors came from every night, which is how you will see the first ones arrive from an AI answer.