Built to rank.
Built to be cited.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a company's information so AI assistants — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — can retrieve it, trust it, and cite it in an answer. Traditional SEO competes for a ranked position in a list of links. AEO competes to be named inside the answer itself. The two are complementary, not alternatives.

No. Google still handles the large majority of web searches and remains the biggest source of discovery traffic for contractors and industrial suppliers. What has changed is that a second discovery channel now sits on top of search: people ask an assistant and act on the two or three companies it names. Abandoning SEO to chase AI visibility means giving up traffic that still converts. The correct approach is to do both.

An AI assistant cites a company when it can find clear, consistent, verifiable facts about it. In practice that means four things: services described in the words customers actually use, an explicitly stated service area, licenses and certifications listed as structured data, and the same company name, address, and phone number everywhere it appears online. Contractors are frequently invisible to assistants because this information lives in a PDF capability statement or in a project manager's head rather than as readable text on a page.

A knowledge library is a structured set of pages that captures what a company actually knows — specifications, materials, methods, code requirements, tolerances, typical lead times — written as plain factual answers and marked up with schema. For a fabrication shop that might mean pages on alloy selection, weld procedures, and finish specs. It differs from a blog in that it is written to be quoted rather than read, and it compounds: each answered question is another entry point for both search and AI.

Expect three to six months before AI citations show up consistently. Assistants draw on both live retrieval and trained knowledge, so newly published pages can be quoted within weeks when they are retrieved live, while broader recognition takes longer. Anyone promising AI visibility in thirty days is describing something they cannot control.

Both are possible. If an existing site is fast, mobile-usable, and structurally sound, AEO work can be layered onto it and that is the cheaper path. A rebuild makes sense when the site is slow, unusable on a phone, or built on a page builder that blocks proper structured data. We tell you which situation you are in before any money changes hands, and we will say so when a rebuild is not warranted.

FORGD works on monthly retainers: $2,500 per month for a single site with base AEO setup, $6,000 per month for a full knowledge library with an ongoing content engine and citation reporting, and custom pricing for multi-brand or multi-market operations. There are no setup fees and engagements can be cancelled with thirty days' notice.

Two sets of numbers. Conventional search metrics — rankings, organic sessions, and form submissions — plus AI citation tracking, which means running the questions a buyer would actually ask across the major assistants on a schedule and recording whether the company is named. The second set is newer and less precise than search analytics, and we report it as what it is rather than dressing it up as a dashboard metric.