AI visibility guide · Updated July 2026
Answer engine optimisation for recruitment.
AEO is the practice of being the answer when a candidate asks an assistant where to work, rather than a link they might click. In recruitment, right now, almost nobody is the answer.
Candidates increasingly start with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity instead of a search box. Those tools do not return 10 blue links. They return 1 synthesised answer naming 3 to 5 employers, and the brands not named do not exist in that moment. Across the 100 UK employer brands we score weekly for The SetpointHQ Index, the median citation score is under 30 out of 100. The answer seats are sitting empty.
AEO, GEO and SEO: what’s actually different
| SEO | GEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Optimises for | Ranking in search results | Being retrieved and used by generative engines | Being named in the final answer |
| Unit of success | Clicks | Retrieval and synthesis | Citations and mentions |
| Key levers | Keywords, links, technical health | Structured data, crawlability, entity records | Question-shaped content, quotable evidence, trust signals |
| In recruitment | Job board and careers page rankings | Assistants can read your roles and brand | Assistants recommend you to candidates |
The 3 stack rather than compete. GEO gets you into the machine’s working material. AEO gets you into its mouth. SEO still matters because search results feed the engines too. The full step-by-step is in our guide to making your recruitment brand show up in AI answers.
5 AEO moves that work in recruitment
- Publish pages shaped like the candidate’s question. “Is [your company] a good place to work as a nurse” beats “Our culture” every time.
- Lead with the answer. Assistants lift opening paragraphs that resolve the question directly. Bury the answer and you lose the citation.
- Give every claim a number. In our probes the assistants consistently quote sources with figures: salaries, ratios, timelines, headcounts.
- Hold a comparison honestly. Answers to “where should I work” are comparative by nature. Content comparing you to the market, fairly, is exactly the raw material an answer needs.
- Keep your entity clean. Consistent naming across your site, LinkedIn and Wikidata is what lets an assistant attribute the evidence to you with confidence.
In an answer engine there is no page 2. There isn’t really a page 1. There is the answer, and there is everyone else.
How we measure it
The SetpointHQ Index puts real candidate questions to all 4 major assistants every week and records who gets named, at what position, for 100 UK employer brands. Citation carries the heaviest weight of our 5 dimensions because it is the closest thing this field has to a scoreboard. Sector by sector, the pattern holds: knowledge graph scores in the 90s, citation medians in the 20s. The machines know everyone. They recommend almost no one.
Are you the answer, or the omission?
The £999 Recruitment Marketing Audit scores your brand on all 5 dimensions against the 100 on the Index and names the finding that costs you most.
Book the auditSource: The SetpointHQ Index, 100 UK employer brands, scored weekly across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.