Your next patient asked ChatGPT for a recommendation. It named the practice down the road.
I'm Shanaz Begum. I make regulated UK practices the answer ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google AI Overviews give — measured on the prompts your actual patients and clients type, fixed in four weeks, and reported with screenshots either way.
Three kinds of practice, one problem
High-value, locally chosen, and increasingly recommended by a machine rather than found on a map.
A single implant case is worth thousands. Patients now ask an AI which practice to trust before they ever open a website.
Prospective patients research safety, qualifications and price for weeks. The engines answer those questions on your behalf, accurately or not.
87% of firms tested had no AI citation share at all. The few that do are taking the enquiries quietly, in their own postcode.
Photography is illustrative and does not depict clients of AEO-REX.
Three things that are true about your website this morning
None of this is speculation. It is measurable on your domain in under a minute, and most practices fail all three without ever being told.
UK small businesses were found actively blocking GPTBot in their own robots.txt — most had no idea.
Study of 100 UK small businesses, January 2026. Only 3 had any AI discovery files. Average visibility score: 31/100. This is a five-minute fix that most agencies never check.
of UK law firms tested had zero AI citation share for the queries their own clients ask.
Independent 2026 audit, 80 firms × 200 queries × 5 platforms. The 13% that do appear are quietly taking the entire AI-driven enquiry market in their area. Firms that started in 2024 are still extending the lead.
of UK consumers now research a legal or health question with AI before they contact anyone.
Around 40% of UK adults have asked a chatbot a health question. Roughly one in three UK Google searches now returns an AI Overview above the blue links. The consideration set is decided before your website is ever opened.
Move the two sliders. It's your own arithmetic, not mine.
Most owners don't notice this leak for a full quarter, because nothing breaks. The phone just rings slightly less than it should, and the enquiries go somewhere you can't see.
Assumptions, stated plainly: 25% of enquiries now begin in an AI-mediated answer (UK surveys put AI-first research at 25–40% of under-45s), 85% of practices are not named in those answers, and you convert 30% of enquiries you actually receive. Change any of them on the call and the number changes. This is an illustration, not a measurement — the free check gives you your real score.
Live teardowns of real UK practices
These are not clients and I make no claim to have improved them. They are audits I ran on live, publicly accessible UK websites, with identifying details removed. Every “before” line is a fact I recorded on the date shown and can reproduce in front of you. I publish these instead of testimonials because they are checkable — and because the first thing you'll want to know is whether the same things are true of you.
The whole engagement, in four steps
Your domain, scored across the major engines. Tells you if you're blocking the crawlers and where you stand. No card, no call.
40 prompts your real patients or clients type, run across five engines by me. Screenshots of who's named instead of you, and a fix list in priority order.
I do the work: schema, llms.txt, named-practitioner authority pages, answer content, entity and citation signals. You approve; you don't build.
The engines change weekly and competitors move. Monthly re-scan, monthly fixes, one page of plain English. Rolling, cancel anytime.
Published prices. Because you deserve to know before the call.
Specialist AEO agencies in the UK charge £2,000–£10,000 a month, plus a £1,500–£5,000 onboarding fee. I'm one person with my own scanner, so I carry none of their per-client software licensing — that's a cost structure, not a corner cut. Here is the whole list.
If your tracked prompts haven't moved in 90 days, the next three months are free.
Not a refund you have to chase — I keep working until the needle moves, at my cost. I can offer that because I choose who I take on: if the check shows there's nothing here worth fixing, I'll tell you so and charge you nothing.
I taught physics for a decade. I'm good at explaining the thing everyone's pretending to understand.
Ten years in STEM education, most recently as an Applied Science lecturer at BMet College in Birmingham. When AI search took off through 2024 and 2025 I watched the same pattern repeat: patients and clients stopped Googling and started asking, and the practices I knew were not in the answers. The specialist agencies were priced for corporates. The DIY guides were generic. So I built the thing that was missing.
Evidence-led, founder-delivered, no juniors, no outsourcing. That's a promise about quality, so let me answer the obvious worry: I cap myself at four builds a month and three Authority clients precisely so that never becomes a queue. You get a direct number and a reply the same working day.
My own score on my own scanner: 41 in March → 62 in July → 85 by October. Re-scanned monthly and published whether it flatters me or not.
AEO-REX is early. I'd rather show you dated teardowns you can verify than a wall of testimonials you can't.
Find out what AI says about you. It takes 60 seconds and I don't call you.
Your score across the major engines, whether you're blocking the crawlers, and the three things costing you the most — on screen before you've finished your coffee. If it comes back healthy I'll tell you to spend your money elsewhere.
What is Answer Engine Optimisation?
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the practice of getting your business named and recommended by AI platforms including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot. Where traditional SEO competes for a position on a page of ten blue links, AEO positions your business as the direct answer the AI gives when a customer asks for a recommendation.
When someone asks “who's the best implant dentist near me?” or “which solicitor should I use for a probate dispute in Birmingham?”, AI doesn't return a list of ten. It gives one answer, sometimes three. AEO-REX makes sure you are in it.
Frequently asked questions
Those tools are a smoke alarm; I'm the fire brigade. They will tell you every day that ChatGPT names your competitor. They will never fix the crawler block in your robots.txt, write your schema, build your named-practitioner authority pages or earn you a third-party citation. If you have someone in-house to act on a dashboard, buy the dashboard — genuinely. If you don't, it's a subscription to bad news.
That's largely fair, which is why I don't sell a £350 programme. The programme is the four-week build, paid once. £350 a month is what it costs to keep it working afterwards. Agencies can't price that low because they pay per-client licence fees to three tracking platforms; I built my own scanner, so I don't.
Technical fixes can register in days — a crawler unblock sometimes shows in a fortnight. Consistent naming across engines takes 8–12 weeks, and in regulated sectors the authority signals typically land months four to seven. Anyone promising faster in legal or healthcare is guessing.
The opposite, usually. SRA publicity rules and health advertising rules both require accuracy, and AI systems currently state wrong hours, wrong services and wrong prices for a large share of UK small businesses. Correcting what the engines say about you is a compliance improvement, not a marketing risk. Everything I publish goes to you for approval first.
No. Paid placement will arrive and it will be expensive; the organic citation profile you build now is what the engines weigh, and it compounds. Starting in 2026 costs less than starting in 2028.
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot — plus agent-readiness checks for the emerging commerce protocols, included in every audit at no extra cost.
Because the risk sits with me, not you: the audit is credited against the build, and if the tracked prompts haven't moved in 90 days you get three months free. I'm early, I say so on my own homepage, and I publish my own score even when it's mediocre. Judge me on the dated teardowns above.