the answer at the top
Search answers the question now. is the answer about you?
Google puts an answer above the results and most people never scroll past it. Being tenth used to be bad. Being outside the answer is worse, because there is nothing to scroll to.
The industry calls this AEO. You do not need the acronym to use it, and it is not on the rest of this page.
The problem
What this looks like from where you are sitting.
Ranking well and being invisible at the same time
You can sit in the top handful of results and still not appear in the summary at the top of the page, which is the part most people read.
Your traffic falls and nothing looks broken
Your position has not moved, so every ranking tool tells you everything is fine, while fewer people click through because they got what they needed above the results.
You cannot see what the answer says
The summary is written fresh each time and it is different for different people, so checking it once on your own screen tells you very little.
A reading of this surface
This is what one looks like.
Example of the shape
Answer box
Web search on
The question a buyer types
“how to track engineering work”
An issue tracker records each unit of work as a ticket and moves it through states until it closes…
Pages it read
atlassian.com · asana.com · wikipedia.org
Cited no page of yours
Every figure comes from a real question put to a real engine, saved with its date and the model that answered. Nothing here is a model guessing.
What you get back
A page you can read, and forward.
It lives at its own address and says the same thing in two weeks, which is what lets you send it to somebody without being there to explain it.
01
Whether the answer mentions you
Stated plainly, question by question, with the answer text saved so you can read what was actually written.
02
Which of your pages it used, if any
The sources behind the answer, so you can tell whether it read your site or somebody else writing about your category.
03
The questions where you are missing
Not a list of keywords. A list of real questions, with the ones you are absent from at the top.
What it costs
Free to look, 19 dollars a month to keep looking.
You give four things — web address, business name, the kind of business you are in, and an email. You never write the questions. We ask a set a customer in your category would actually type.
Where this sits
This sits between ordinary search and AI recommendations, and it is the one most businesses feel first, because it is where the traffic they already had starts quietly going.
What it will not do
The answer box is rewritten constantly and varies by person and place. We measure it the same way every time from a clean position, which makes two of our runs comparable to each other. It does not make our run identical to what you personally see.
The other two surfaces