What is AEO, and does a tradesman need to care?
Visibility
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is a new bit of jargon for an old problem: making sure your business is the one that gets named when somebody asks where to find a plumber.
The difference is who they ask. It used to be Google, and Google gave them a list of links. Now a lot of the time they get an answer instead, written by a machine, with two or three businesses named in it. AEO is the work of being one of the named ones.
That is the whole idea. The rest of this is whether it is real yet, and what actually moves it.
Why it turned up
Ofcom's Online Nation report, published 10 December 2025, put numbers on how fast this happened.
About 30% of Google searches now show an AI summary. More than half of UK adults, 53%, say they see those summaries often. Ofcom add a line worth reading twice: in most cases people "aren't seeking these but finding them now included by their search services". Nobody asked for it.
Separately, ChatGPT had 1.8 billion UK visits in the first eight months of 2025, against 368 million in the same period of 2024.
So the surface changed underneath everybody, and most trade businesses have not adjusted anything.
How it differs from SEO
SEO is about ranking a page. AEO is about being quoted.
A machine writing an answer about plumbers in Bridgend is not picking the top result and reading it out. It is pulling together your website, your Google Business Profile, directory listings, review sites and anything else that mentions you, then writing a summary it is confident about.
Which changes what matters:
Agreement matters more than volume. If your phone number is different on your site, your profile and three directories, the model has no confident answer about you. Being consistent everywhere beats having more pages.
Being quotable matters. Clear plain sentences that answer a specific question, on a page about that question. Not a wall of text about how you are passionate about quality.
Other people mentioning you matters. The model reads more than your own site. Directories, review platforms and local listings feed it.
Reviews matter more than they did. They are both a ranking signal and the raw material for the sentence a machine writes about whether you are any good.
What actually seems to work
I want to be straight here, because AEO is where SEO was in about 2005 and the amount of confident nonsense being sold is remarkable.
Things we do that we can see working:
Finish the Google Business Profile properly. Every category, every service, real photos, service areas, and a system that generates reviews after each job. This is still the highest-return job on the list and it is free.
Make the details identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours. Same on the site, the profile and every listing. This is boring and it is the one most people skip.
Write pages that answer one question each. What a boiler swap costs in your area, how quickly you can get to an emergency, whether you cover a particular town. Plain answers near the top of the page.
Get listed where the models look. Some directories and review aggregators show up in AI answers far more often than their traffic would suggest.
Then watch it. Actually check what the machines say about you, on a schedule, and record it.
Things being sold that I would not pay for: guaranteed placement in AI answers, "AI-optimised" content written by AI, and anything priced per AI mention. Nobody controls these results.
What we have actually seen
Google's AI Overview cites our client LMB Plumbing and Heating by name. That is real, and we monitor it rather than screenshot it once and put it in a case study.
It also moves. The result is not the same every week, which is exactly why I would not let anyone sell you a guarantee on it.
Does a tradesman need to care?
Not urgently, and not at the expense of the basics.
If your Google Business Profile is half finished and nobody answers the phone, AEO is not your problem. Fix those first, and you will have done most of the AEO groundwork anyway, because the same things feed it.
If those are sorted, then yes, because the cost of being invisible in an AI answer is invisible to you. There is no missed call. Nothing shows up in your inbox. You just get less work than the bloke who is in the answer, and you never find out why.
What this article does not claim
Ofcom's figures are UK adults across all searching. There is no published data on how many people ask an AI for a tradesperson specifically, and I am not going to invent one.
The "30% of searches show an AI overview" figure is a snapshot from Ofcom's 2025 report. Google changes this constantly.
The ChatGPT figure is visits, not people, covering January to August 2025.
The list of things that work is what we do and what we observe on our own clients. It is not a controlled study, and AEO is too young for anyone to have one.
The LMB citation is real and monitored. It is not a guarantee and nobody can sell you one.
Sources
Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, published 10 December 2025.
First-party: BetterWays monitoring of Google AI Overview citations for LMB Plumbing and Heating.
Matthew Betts
