IF YOU ARE NOT AT THE TOP, YOU ARE INVISIBLE.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring website content so that AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, and Gemini cite your business directly inside their generated answers. AEO uses schema markup, entity data, llms.txt, and fact-rich passages to make pages extractable. Princeton and Georgia Tech research shows GEO-optimized content achieves 30 to 115 percent higher visibility in AI responses.

Traditional SEO ranks your website on Google's blue links. AEO gets your business named inside the AI answer above the blue links. SEO targets clicks. AEO targets citations. As of 2026, 80 percent of Google searches now end without a click and AI Overviews caused a 61 percent drop in organic CTR for informational queries. Doing one without the other leaves leads on the table.

AEO citations typically start appearing 60 to 90 days after the foundation work ships. Schema, llms.txt, and entity authority compound over six months. The Yaros Company reached 3 Google AI categories owned in 90 days. Anthony Pennacchi and Sons reached number one Map Pack and Featured AI Source in 30 days. Anyone promising results in 30 days is selling paid ads, not AEO.

Wildfire optimizes for the five engines that drive contractor lead flow in 2026: Google AI Mode, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT (browsing and search), Perplexity, Gemini, and Bing Copilot. Each engine uses different signals. Google AI prefers schema and existing top-10 organic rankings. Perplexity favors fact-density and recency. ChatGPT prefers definition patterns and named sources. Wildfire ships content tuned for all five.

Wildfire charges $2,500 per month for the AI Visibility Retainer, which bundles SEO, AEO, GEO, and Local SEO. Other AEO agencies charge $3,500 to $5,000 per month for AEO alone, with SEO and local priced separately. Standalone AEO tooling like Profound, Athena, and Scrunch costs $295 to $399 per month. Wildfire's bundled retainer is the arbitrage between tooling cost and standalone agency markup.

Wildfire reports on three falsifiable metrics each month: number of Google AI citations across tracked queries, change in Google Search Console impressions and CTR for AEO-targeted pages, and inbound calls plus form fills attributed to organic search. We do not report on rankings or impressions in isolation. The number that pays the bills is booked jobs, and that is the number we tie reporting to.

No. Wildfire only sells AEO as part of the bundled $2,500 per month AI Visibility Retainer (SEO + AEO + GEO + Local). AEO without local SEO and traditional SEO foundation is rarely effective, because AI engines preferentially cite content that already ranks in top-10 organic results. Bundling these prevents the common mistake of paying for AEO that has no underlying authority to compound.