Prefer

Answer engine optimisation is the practice of getting a brand named, cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers. Where SEO competes for a position in a list of links, AEO competes for a mention in the single answer an assistant gives, which means optimising the sources those assistants read rather than the ranki

SEO optimises for ranked links on a results page; AEO optimises for being the answer itself. The signals differ too: AI engines lean on citable, well-structured sources such as documentation, comparison pages, listicles and review sites, so a page that ranks well can still be invisible in AI answers, and vice versa.

Prefer tracks five engines on every paid plan: ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. Enterprise can add Qwen, DeepSeek and Claude Sonnet 4 by API. Each engine is monitored separately, because the same prompt often produces a different answer and a different set of citations on each one.

Prefer runs your tracked prompts against every engine on a schedule and scores three things: how often your brand is mentioned, the share of voice you hold against named competitors, and the sentiment of each mention. Every score links back to the exact answer and the sources it cited, so the number is always auditable

The first Prefer report takes about ten minutes to generate. Measurable movement in AI answers usually appears two to six weeks after the recommended content changes ship, because each engine has to re-crawl the source and refresh its index.