AEO for recruiters

Be the recruitment agency AI recommends in your area

When a hiring manager or a candidate in your patch asks ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini or Perplexity who to use, one agency gets named. This programme makes that agency yours, for your disciplines, in your geography, whatever wording they use to ask.

The question

How do I become the recommended recruiter locally?

Build a knowledge base for your business and get ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Perplexity and the rest referencing it before anyone else in your area does. That is what decides who gets found first and who gets recommended. The agency named in the answer today is the one that put the knowledge there first, and there is one slot per niche per patch. Speak to us about AEO and becoming the cited resource for recruitment in your area.

What you're actually getting

Local AI visibility. Named as the recommended recruitment partner when people in your towns and cities ask an assistant who to use, not a ranking on a page nobody clicks.
Coverage of the whole question set, not a keyword list. Discipline, seniority, salary, process, risk, client-side and candidate-side, in the words real people actually type.
A published knowledge foundation you own. Answer-shaped pages, entity and schema architecture, and third-party corroboration that makes the engines confident enough to name you.
Screenshot evidence every cycle. The same defined prompts, every engine, showing where you appear and who appears instead of you.

Why now

There is one slot per niche per patch, and in most disciplines and most towns it is still empty. Publish the foundation now and you are building against nobody, while the models are still deciding who the authority is. Wait eighteen months and you are building against whoever took the slot, against corroborated sources the models already trust, and it costs more and takes longer. The whole advantage is being first to publish.

Answer engine optimisation for specialist and regional recruitment agencies. Built and run by Simon Young, Doncaster and South Yorkshire, working nationally.

Book a strategy call What AEO is, in general

Recruitment consultant on a call at her desk in an open-plan office — Your consultants answer these questions all day. The machines are answering them too.

Last updated 12 August 2026

The question map

Two audiences, two entirely different question sets

This is what makes a recruitment programme different from a generic AEO retainer. You have two audiences asking two entirely different question sets, and almost nobody optimises for both.

Client-side: the fee-payers
Type	Example prompts
Selection	“Best engineering recruitment agency in Doncaster” · “Who should I use to hire a CNC machinist in South Yorkshire?” · “Specialist oil and gas recruiters Aberdeen”
Commercial	“What do recruitment agencies charge in the UK?” · “Retained vs contingency for a finance director” · “Is 20% reasonable for a welder placement?”
Process	“How long does it take to hire a maintenance engineer?” · “What should be in a terms of business?” · “How do rebate periods work?”
Risk	“What if a placement leaves in three months?” · “Do I need an agency for a single hire?” · “How do I check an agency's fill rate?”

Hiring manager and candidate shaking hands in an engineering workshop reception — Every square on the grid ends in a placement, or somebody else's placement.

Candidate-side: the supply that makes you sellable
Type	Example prompts
Selection	“Which agencies should I register with for HGV work near me?” · “Best agencies for subsea engineering jobs” · “Is [your agency] any good?”
Salary	“Average salary for a maintenance engineer in Sheffield” · “Agency day rate for a contract project manager in Yorkshire” · “What should a Band 6 nurse earn on agency rates?”
Career	“How do I move from workshop to field service?” · “What tickets do I need for offshore work?” · “Is contracting worth it in engineering right now?”
Process	“How long after an interview should I hear back?” · “Should I go direct or through an agency?”

Three things fall out of this map, and all three are commercial

The candidate side is cheap and uncontested. Salary and career questions are enormous in volume, almost entirely unworked by agencies, and they're exactly the factual, structured, updatable content answer engines love to cite. Own the salary answers for your vertical and you become the cited authority for that vertical, and that bleeds directly into the client-side selection answers. You win the fee-payer by teaching the candidate.
"Is [your agency] any good?" is already being answered about you. By something, based on whatever it could find. Most agencies have never once checked what that answer says. It's the first thing the audit looks at, and it's occasionally alarming.
The money sits at discipline × geography × seniority. Not "recruitment agency Aberdeen", which is contested and low margin. But "specialist subsea engineering recruiter, Aberdeen, contract" is defensible, has real fee value behind every conversion, and in most cases literally nobody has built the knowledge to own it.

That grid is what the levels are actually buying: how many of those squares you claim, and how hard.

What changed

Search didn't die. The click did.

Google's AI Overviews now appear on roughly half of all queries. When one appears, click-through on the top result falls by somewhere between a third and two thirds depending on query type. Around six in ten searches now end without anyone visiting a website at all. Rankings hold. Impressions hold. Sessions collapse.

Most recruitment agencies are living through this and calling it "the market's quiet." It isn't the market. It's the interface. The answer got given before anyone reached the website.

And here's the part people get wrong: that traffic hasn't moved channel. In sector after sector, the clicks stopped rather than migrated. AI referral traffic is still a low single-digit share of all web visits. So "we'll just pick up our AI traffic instead" is not a plan. The plan is to be inside the answer, because for a growing share of your buyers the answer is the whole journey. They never arrive at a website to be converted. They arrive at a shortlist.

Knowledge is the asset now

For twenty years, search was a ranking game. You competed for a position on a list, and the list reset every time Google changed its mind. Whatever you built was rented.

Answer engines don't work like that. They don't rank, they decide who to trust and then repeat what they've learned. That decision is built on accumulated, corroborated knowledge: what exists about you, what other sources say about you, how consistently it all agrees, and whether you're the source that actually answered the question.

So what you're building is no longer a ranking. It's a knowledge base: a body of specific, accurate, attributable answers about your sector, your patch and your specialism that the models absorb, trust and quote. Three things follow, and between them they're the whole commercial case.

It compounds

Every answer you publish and every third-party source that corroborates it makes the next citation easier to win. Traditional SEO decayed the moment you stopped. This accrues.

It's defensible

Once a model is confident you're the authority on contract subsea engineering in Aberdeen, a competitor can't outbid you for that position, because there's nothing to bid on. They have to build a deeper, better-corroborated knowledge base than yours, from behind, while you keep building. That's a moat, not a ranking.

It's empty right now

In most towns and most vertical niches, nobody has done this work. Ask an assistant to recommend an engineering recruiter in your area and you'll typically get a couple of national job boards, whichever agency happens to have an old directory listing, and a generic non-answer. There is no incumbent. The position is unclaimed.

The window

The land-grab period in any new discovery channel runs eighteen months to two years, and this one started roughly a year ago.

What makes this one unusual is that being early doesn't just help, it entrenches. Because models weight corroborated, long-standing, consistently-agreeing sources, the agency that establishes itself as the answer becomes the reference point later entrants have to dislodge. Being first on Google meant being first until the next algorithm update. Being first here means being the thing the next competitor's content gets measured against.

Lock in your patch now and you're not buying twelve months of visibility. You're buying the default position, and everyone who comes after has to argue with it.

Why me

I've been writing about answer engine optimisation since October 2019, more than three years before ChatGPT existed. I followed it that November with a piece called "The Death of the SEO Industry." At the time it read as a provocation.

That's not a vanity credential. It matters because it means I built this thinking from first principles, from how machines decide what to trust and repeat, rather than reverse-engineering it from a blog post in 2024, like most of the "AEO agencies" that appeared eighteen months ago. When you're buying help in a category this young, the honest question to ask any supplier is: what were you doing before this was a category? Most can't answer it. I can, and the dated receipts are published.

A research-and-publish pipeline that makes volume possible. Mining the real questions your clients and candidates ask, from search data, People Also Ask, trade forums, community sources and your own enquiry inbox, then researching and building genuinely answer-shaped pages against them, quality-scoring each one, and getting them indexed fast.
Multi-engine citation tracking with evidence. Your named prompts run repeatedly across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI surfaces, with screenshots. You see where you appear, who appears instead of you, and what moved.
Entity and citation architecture. Schema, named-consultant authorship, third-party corroboration, directory and profile consistency. All the unglamorous scaffolding that decides whether a model is confident enough to say your name out loud.
Plain English, always. If I can't explain what I did and why it worked to a non-technical MD over a pint, I haven't done it properly.

One honest warning

There's a wave of "AEO" out there that's a rebranded SEO retainer with a new sticker. The tells are easy.

1.They conflate AEO and GEO and can't tell you the difference.
2.They promise multi-LLM citation tracking but can't produce screenshot evidence against a defined prompt set.
3.They treat schema as a one-off setup.
4.They tell you third-party authority doesn't matter, usually because they can't do it.

Ask me those four questions. Then ask the next agency the same four.

The levels

The three levels

All prices per month, excluding VAT. Three-month minimum, then rolling with 30 days' notice. A twelve-month commitment takes 10% off.

	Visibility	Recommendation	Dominate
Monthly	£1,250	£1,995	£3,495
The promise	You exist to the machines	You're on the shortlist	You are the answer
Best for	Single-office agencies, 3–10 heads, one core discipline	Multi-discipline or multi-site, 10–30 heads	Sector leaders taking or defending a specialism
Knowledge assets / month	8	15	30
Tracked prompts	30–40	100–120	250+
Engines	ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity	Plus Gemini, Claude, Copilot	All, monitored weekly
Coverage	1 discipline × 1 location	Up to 3 × 3	Unlimited in agreed scope
Third-party citation building	Foundation only	Active programme	Active plus editorial placement
Original data asset	·	·	Annual salary survey / hiring index
Area exclusivity	·	·	Yes
Reporting	Monthly	Fortnightly	Weekly plus live dashboard
Simon's time	Monthly review call	Fortnightly working session	Weekly, plus quarterly on-site

Onboarding and build: £995 one-off. That covers entity architecture, schema build, baseline measurement and question-bank construction. Waived on a twelve-month commitment.

Front door: the AI Visibility Audit, £495 one-off. Credited in full against your first month if you start within 30 days.

Level 1, Visibility

£1,250 / month

“Right now, when someone asks an AI about recruiters in your patch, you don't come up. This fixes that.”

The problem it solves: you're invisible. Not badly ranked. Absent. The models have no confident basis on which to say your name.

Baseline and question bank. 30–40 high-intent prompts across your client and candidate audiences, agreed with you, tracked monthly across ChatGPT, Google's AI surfaces and Perplexity with screenshot evidence.
Entity foundation. LocalBusiness, Organisation, Service and FAQ schema built and maintained. Named-consultant authorship so your people are entities, not anonymous bylines. Name, address and profile consistency corrected across the directories the models actually read.
8 knowledge assets per month, built from your question bank: salary guides, fee explainers, process answers, discipline pages. Answer-shaped, written in your voice, checked by a human, never generic.
Google Business Profile discipline. Weekly activity, category correctness, review prompting cadence. Still one of the strongest local signals and still neglected by nearly everyone.
Monthly report and review call. What we published, what moved, where you appear now, and who appears in your place where you don't.

Not included: third-party editorial placement, competitor displacement work, multi-location scale, weekly monitoring.

Honest expectation: first movement in citation rates typically shows at 30–60 days as models refresh. Meaningful shortlist presence in your core niche by month four to six.

Level 2, Recommendation

£1,995 / month

“Being findable isn't the game. Being named is. This gets you into the shortlist of three.”

The problem it solves: you turn up occasionally, in passing, usually below a job board or a national. You're in the room but you're not the recommendation.

Everything in Visibility, plus:

100–120 prompts across six engines, tracked fortnightly with evidence: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews / AI Mode.
Up to three disciplines across three locations. This is where the discipline × geography grid gets built properly, with an architecture that doesn't cannibalise itself.
15 knowledge assets per month. Enough volume to own a question category rather than dabble in it, including the full candidate-side salary and career set, which is where the compounding authority comes from.
Active third-party citation building. Trade directories, sector bodies, regional business press, industry roundups, partner and client mentions, review platform presence. This is the majority of what makes a model confident enough to recommend you, and it's the line item cheap providers quietly skip.
Competitor citation analysis. Every fortnight: who's being named instead of you, on which prompts, and what they have that you don't. Then we go and get it.
Named-consultant authority. Your top billers become citable experts in their niche, through bios, authored answers and quoted commentary. Models cite people as well as brands, and recruitment is a people business already.
Fortnightly working session. Not a status update, a working half-hour on what's moving.

Honest expectation: consistent presence in shortlist answers for your primary discipline by month four to six. Measurable displacement of at least one incumbent name by month six to nine.

Level 3, Dominate

£3,495 / month

“When anyone asks about your specialism in your patch, client or candidate, yours is the name that comes back. Every engine. Every time.”

The problem it solves: you're on the shortlist and you want to be the shortlist. Or you're a genuine specialist with a window to close before someone else notices it's open.

Everything in Recommendation, plus:

30 fully researched pieces per month. Every one built to fill a specific, identified knowledge gap in your sector and patch: a question your market is asking that nobody has properly answered. Researched, not spun. Sourced, structured, attributed to a named consultant, and published to compound. Three hundred and sixty pieces a year, each one a brick in a knowledge base nobody else has.
250+ prompts, weekly monitoring, live dashboard. You see movement as it happens, not a month later.
Unlimited disciplines and locations within agreed scope. Full grid coverage across every specialism, every patch, both audiences.
Editorial placement programme. Named features, trade press commentary, podcast appearances, industry report contributions. High-corroboration third-party sources that models weight heavily and competitors can't shortcut.
Your own original data asset. A salary survey or regional hiring index, published under your name, updated quarterly. Original data is the most citable asset class there is, it earns links, press and AI citations simultaneously, and it turns you from a source into the source.
Competitor displacement campaigns. Targeted work on the specific prompts where a named rival currently owns the answer.
Area exclusivity. While you're on Dominate, I won't take a directly competing agency in the same discipline and geography. That's not a sales tactic, it's the only way the work stays honest, and it's why this level is capped.
Weekly reporting, plus a quarterly on-site. I come to you. Half a day with your consultants, pulling the real questions off the desk and into the pipeline.

Honest expectation: category ownership in a defined niche within six to nine months. This is also the level where results depend most on you. On-site access, consultant time and permission to publish real data are what make it work.

The audit, £495

Before any retainer, and available entirely on its own.

Your current citation position across all major engines on 25 defined prompts, with screenshots
What the machines currently say about you, including tone and accuracy
Which competitors are named in your place, and why
Your entity and schema gaps, listed and prioritised
A twelve-month roadmap: the questions worth owning, in the order worth owning them
Delivered in five working days, in plain English, yours to keep whether you hire me or not

Credited in full against your first month if you proceed within 30 days.

Some agencies will read the audit and conclude the opportunity in their niche is too thin to justify a retainer. I'd rather they found that out for £495 than for £12,000.

The ROI conversation

Recruitment maths is mercifully simple. A permanent placement runs 15–25% of first-year salary. On a £40,000 role at 18%, that's £7,200 in fee.

Level	Monthly	One extra placement covers
Visibility	£1,250	Nearly six months
Recommendation	£1,995	Over three and a half months
Dominate	£3,495	Two months

You're not comparing this to your marketing budget. You're comparing it to one placement. The question is whether being the named answer for your specialism is worth one placement a quarter.

For a contract or senior desk billing £15,000–£25,000 a placement, Dominate is a fraction of one.

Case study, in summary

From zero AI citations to cited across nine platforms, in five months

Not a recruitment agency, a specialist consultancy in a high-fee, high-trust, advice-led market. The shape of the problem is the same as yours: real expertise, a reputation built on referrals, and nothing published that an answer engine could retrieve. Client name withheld.

Starting position, October 2025: near-zero organic footprint, no pillar content, no AI citations at all. The programme began with two articles.

Five months, October 2025 to February 2026
Measure	Result	Change
Search impressions	417,496	+80.6%
Organic clicks	1,934	+81.9%
Sessions	2,928	+88.7%
New users	1,774	+112.5%
Sessions referred by AI assistants	340	+87.8%
Conversions	170	+900%
Conversions from AI assistant traffic	40 key events	+700%

Where the AI traffic came from

Within five months the brand was being referenced across nine distinct AI and answer platforms. ChatGPT drove the majority, 273 sessions across referral and direct, then Perplexity on 45, Gemini 12, Copilot 7, with the remainder spread across Mistral and Kagi.

The engagement rates are the interesting part. Gemini arrivals engaged at 91.7%, Copilot at 85.7%, ChatGPT direct at 71%. People who arrive on an AI recommendation have already been sold. They aren't browsing, they're checking.

What it took

The founder's own methodology, frameworks and interview transcripts turned into a structured knowledge base, so every page was grounded in real expertise rather than restated commodity content.
A pillar-and-cluster architecture: one authoritative page per core topic, surrounded by satellites answering the long-tail questions underneath it.
Schema markup and deliberate internal linking on every page, so machines could parse the relationships as well as the words.
Sustained publishing. Two pages in month one, ramping to a steady pace, 118 pages over five months in total. Compound authority, not a launch.

What this means for a recruitment agency

Two honest caveats. Different sector, and that programme ran at a content volume above the levels priced on this page. But the mechanism transfers exactly: an expert business with nothing published went from invisible to cited across nine platforms in five months, in a niche where nobody had built the knowledge first. Recruitment is that niche almost everywhere, right now. Discipline by discipline, town by town, the slots are still empty.

Five months is the honest number. Which makes the question not whether to do this, but whether you'd rather start it now or start it against a competitor who already has.

Questions recruiters ask

How do I become the recommended recruiter locally?

Isn't AEO for recruiters just SEO?

No, and the difference is measurable. SEO gets you a link on a page a shrinking number of people click. This gets you named inside the answer, which is increasingly the entire interaction. They share some plumbing, they don't share an outcome. Worth saying plainly: we were writing about answer engine optimisation in 2019, it isn't a rebrand.

How do I know AEO is working for my agency?

Screenshots. The same defined prompts, every cycle, every engine, with evidence of where you appear and who appears instead of you. If a supplier can't show you that, they aren't measuring, they're describing.

Can't I just do this myself with ChatGPT?

You can generate pages. What you can't easily do is question mining at scale, entity architecture, third-party corroboration, which is most of what actually moves a model, and the measurement discipline to know whether any of it worked. Volume of generic content is currently the fastest way to get filtered out.

Why now? Can't this wait six months?

It can. It'll cost more and take longer. Right now the position in your niche is empty and you're building against nobody. In eighteen months you'll be building against whoever took it, and models weight established, corroborated sources.

How much does AEO for a recruitment agency cost?

Three levels, per month excluding VAT: Visibility £1,250, Recommendation £1,995, Dominate £3,495. Onboarding and build is £995 one-off, waived on a twelve-month commitment. The front door is a £495 AI Visibility Audit, credited in full against your first month if you start within 30 days.

What does one extra placement cover?

A permanent placement runs 15–25% of first-year salary. On a £40,000 role at 18% that's £7,200 in fee, which covers nearly six months of Visibility, over three and a half months of Recommendation, or two months of Dominate.

I turn down more agencies than I take on. If your niche is too crowded for this to pay back, or you're not going to give me the consultant time it needs, I'll tell you and walk away. I'd rather have five clients who own their categories than fifty who move sideways.

Claim your patch

Start with the £495 audit and see exactly what the machines say about your agency today, who they name instead of you, and which questions are worth owning first. Credited in full against your first month.

Book a strategy call How we measure