Technical SEO Foundation
Site architecture, schema markup, Core Web Vitals, and crawlability fixes — the technical foundation both traditional search and AEO depend on.
SEO & Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Retainers
SEO & AEO Retainers
Technical SEO and answer engine optimization (AEO) built on the same engineering foundation we use for client software — so search engines and AI answer tools both find, trust, and cite you.
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Deep Dev Solutions provides SEO and AEO (answer engine optimization) retainer services for businesses in the UK, US, and GCC. AEO is the practice of structuring a site so AI search and chat tools (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews) can find, understand, and cite it — built on the same technical foundation as traditional SEO: clean architecture, structured data, and fast, crawlable pages.
Problems we solve
Why this keeps going wrong
Most SEO retainers are content-and-links work bolted onto a site that was never built to be found. That misses what growing businesses now need at once: ranking in traditional search, and being cited by AI answer engines, which reward technical structure — schema, site speed, crawlable architecture — over content volume alone. Without the engineering foundation, neither search engines nor AI tools can reliably find or trust the site.
Capabilities
What we build
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Structuring content and schema so AI search and chat tools can find, understand, and cite your site as a source.
On-Page & Content Structure
Page structure, headings, and internal linking built around how both search engines and AI tools parse content.
Reporting Tied to Real Signals
Rankings, qualified organic traffic, and AI citation visibility — not vanity metrics or impressions.
Is this right for you?
A good fit if
- You rank reasonably well but are not being cited when buyers ask an AI assistant about your category.
- Your site has real technical problems — schema, crawlability, Core Web Vitals — blocking everything else.
- You want reporting tied to qualified traffic and enquiries, not a ranking count.
- You have been burned by an SEO supplier who could not explain what they actually did.
Probably not, if
- You want guaranteed rankings by a fixed date. Nobody can honestly sell you that.
- You want links bought at volume. We do not do that, and it is a liability.
“Isn't AEO just SEO with a new name?”
Buyers ask this openly — it is one of the most visible discussions in the category, and the skepticism is earned, because plenty of agencies did rename their existing SEO deck. Here is the honest version. The foundation is genuinely the same: crawlable, fast, well-structured pages with accurate schema. What actually differs is the unit of success. Classic SEO optimises for a ranked link a person clicks. AEO optimises for a self-contained passage a model can lift and attribute — which changes how pages get structured, how directly questions get answered, and how success is measured, since there is no ranking position in an AI answer to report. That is a real difference in the work, but it is not a separate discipline, and we will not sell it to you as a second retainer.
Process
How we work
01
Free SEO & AEO Audit
We audit technical SEO health, schema coverage, Core Web Vitals, and AI-search readiness, and identify what to fix first.
02
Fix & Structure
Technical SEO fixes and schema implementation completed before any content or visibility push begins.
03
Build Visibility
Content structure, internal linking, and AEO-specific work (direct-answer blocks, structured FAQs) built around real buyer questions.
04
Report & Iterate
Regular reporting tied to rankings, qualified traffic, and AI citation appearances, with clear timelines — no overnight-traffic promises.
Engagement
How we scope the work
Most agencies make you book a call just to find out how they engage. Here are the three shapes this work usually takes, so you can tell where you fit before you contact us. Final scope and cost depend on your specific requirements — we quote after the free audit, not before.
Tier 1 — Audit & fix
Find what is blocking you, then clear it.
- Full technical SEO and AEO audit with a prioritised fix list
- Schema, crawlability, and Core Web Vitals corrected
- A one-off engagement — yours to act on with any supplier
- Best when the site has never had a technical pass
Most common
Tier 2 — Growth retainer
Ongoing organic and answer-engine visibility.
- Continuous technical work plus content structured for extraction
- Answer blocks and entity data built so AI tools can cite you
- Reporting against qualified traffic and enquiries, not ranking counts
- Scope scales with your traffic and how competitive your niche is
Tier 3 — Competitive & multi-market
For contested niches and more than one country.
- Multi-region targeting with correct hreflang and market-specific content
- Deeper competitive analysis in categories with entrenched incumbents
- Digital PR and citation building to close authority gaps
- Appropriate where the head terms are genuinely hard to win
Technical stack
Technologies we commonly use for this service, selected based on the specific project requirements.
Google Search ConsoleGoogle Analytics 4Schema.org / JSON-LDCore Web Vitals toolingAhrefsScreaming Frog
Common questions
Questions business owners usually ask before starting a project.
For traditional SEO there are reasonably well-established market rates. For AEO specifically there are not — the category is new enough that published pricing benchmarks genuinely do not exist yet, and anyone quoting you a confident industry-standard AEO rate is inventing it. What we can be concrete about is structure: an audit is a fixed one-off, a fix-first sprint is time-boxed, and a retainer is a monthly commitment. We scope from your actual technical baseline after the free audit rather than quoting a package before we have looked at the site.
This is the genuinely hard part of the discipline and it is worth being honest about. There is no position number in an AI-generated answer, so the classic ranking report does not apply. What can be measured: whether your pages are actually being cited when buyers ask questions in your category, whether the passages are structured so a model can extract and attribute them, whether your entity data is consistent enough to be recognised, and — the one that pays the bills — whether qualified traffic and enquiries move. We report against those and we will not pad it with metrics that look impressive and mean nothing.
AEO is the practice of structuring a website so AI search and chat tools — like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews — can find, understand, and cite it as a source. It builds on the same technical foundation as SEO: clean structure, schema, and fast, crawlable pages.
They overlap heavily. AEO adds a focus on structured, extractable answers and schema that AI tools can cite directly, on top of the technical SEO foundation both disciplines depend on. We don't treat them as separate retainers because the underlying engineering work is the same.
No — this retainer is organic SEO and AEO only. If you need paid campaign management, ask us directly and we can advise on the right fit.
SEO and AEO compound over time as search engines and AI tools re-crawl and re-evaluate your site. We won't promise overnight traffic — we'll give you a clear, honest timeline based on your current technical baseline.
Ongoing technical SEO and AEO work, regular reporting on rankings and qualified traffic, and direct access to the team doing the work, not a black-box monthly PDF.
Yes. We audit schema, Core Web Vitals, crawlability, and site structure, and fix what's blocking visibility before investing further in content or campaigns.
Ready to fix this for your business?
Start with a free audit. We will review the problem and tell you exactly what it will take to solve it.
Get a Free SEO & AEO Audit