Your buyers stopped clicking ten blue links. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews — and those assistants answer with the sources they trust. Answer engine optimization is how your brand becomes the answer.
Ask an assistant "best X for Y" and watch the sources: community threads dominate, and Reddit dominates community threads. When real people recommend a product in a thread that survives moderation, assistants treat it as evidence — far more than they trust your own landing page. That's the mechanism, and it's why RouterGrowth's AI-visibility work is built on top of the Reddit Growth service: earn the credible answer in the threads assistants read, and the assistants repeat it. The same mechanism is covered from the search side in our Reddit SEO guide.
The fixed set of buyer questions in your category — what people actually ask assistants, not just what they type into Google.
Community-voice Reddit presence, third-party mentions and LLM-readable pages (clean structure, llms.txt, schema) that assistants can cite.
Monthly tracking of brand mentions, sentiment and cited sources across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews — share of voice vs competitors.
The industry hasn't settled on a term. Answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO) and LLM SEO all describe the same outcome: when an AI generates an answer in your category, your brand is in it, positively, with a citation. It complements classic SEO — rankings still matter — but the winning inputs shift from backlinks toward credible third-party mentions, and no platform produces those at Reddit's scale.
Making your brand the answer AI assistants give — cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews when buyers ask questions in your category. Also called GEO or LLM SEO.
Assistants weight community sources heavily for commercial questions, and Reddit is the community source they cite most. A credible recommendation in the right thread outweighs your own marketing page.
A fixed panel of buyer questions, checked monthly across assistants: is your brand mentioned, how, with which sources — versus competitors. Raw numbers, no vanity metrics.
No one honestly can — assistants change constantly. RouterGrowth guarantees the inputs (presence, mentions, structure) and transparent measurement of the outputs, so you see exactly what moves.
The audit shows how ChatGPT and Perplexity answer your category's buyer questions today, and where you're absent.
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