Built so UK businesses get named in AI answers.

The problem we exist to solve

Search has changed shape. ChatGPT alone now handles around 50 million shopping queries every single day, and Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot together compound that traffic by another order of magnitude. Buyers are no longer scrolling ten blue links — they're asking an assistant a question and acting on a single recommended answer.

If you are a UK small business, you are almost certainly absent from those answers. Roughly three percent of UK SMEs are reliably cited in AI responses for their own category terms. Most have never been audited for AI visibility. Most have no schema beyond what their CMS auto-generates. Most have no idea whether ChatGPT can read their product catalogue, let alone recommend it.

That gap is what Rex Commerce® closes.

What we actually do

Rex Commerce is a 60–90 day productised engagement that wires three layers into a single stack:

• Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — entity authority, citation seeding, third-party reinforcement so AI engines recognise your brand as the canonical answer for your category.
• Agentic commerce infrastructure — JSON-LD Product/Offer schema, ACP-compliant feeds, UCP capability profiles, and merchant programme submissions so AI agents can read, compare, and recommend your catalogue natively.
• AI-referrer conversion — landing pages tuned for AI-referred buyers, plus server-side attribution that tracks revenue from AI traffic without third-party pixels (which AI agents increasingly bypass).

You can read the full deliverable list on the homepage or the detailed methodology on the FAQ.

The founder

AEO-REX was founded in September 2025 by Shanaz Begum, who works at the intersection of structured data, large language models, and small-business marketing. Her work focuses on translating emerging technical standards (OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol, Google's Universal Commerce Protocol, Stripe's Shared Payment Token spec) into operational playbooks that UK SMEs can actually deploy without a six-figure tech budget. Background: science lecturer, Les Mills and Beachbody Insanity instructor, single mother of three. Featured on Islam Channel's Today show in January 2026 and named to DesignRush's Top AI Companies list in 2026.

She has presented research on AI visibility at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, and works with the Redbridge Chamber of Commerce and the Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce on innovation programmes that help member businesses adapt to AI-driven discovery.

You can reach her directly: shanazbegum@aeo-rex.com.

Mission

The brands cited inside AI engines today become the defaults of tomorrow. We exist so UK small businesses are not displaced from that default by accident — and so the cost of catching up later does not become prohibitive.

How we work

• UK only, deliberately. Compliance, payment, and search-language nuance vary too much by region. We focus on what we can deliver well.
• SME-priced from day one. £897 setup plus £197/month, deliberately benchmarked against the parent service ladder so AEO and agentic-commerce work is accessible to early-stage UK SMEs, not just established brands.
• Twelve businesses per cohort. Hand-on work needs hand-on capacity. Cohort caps protect quality and let us measure outcomes properly.
• Fixed-fee Statements of Work. No hourly billing surprises. The free AI Visibility Check confirms scope before any contract is signed.
• Open standards only. Everything we implement (schema.org, ACP, UCP) is portable. If you ever leave Rex Commerce, you keep the work.

Affiliations

• Saïd Business School, University of Oxford — research presentations on AI search visibility
• Redbridge Chamber of Commerce — innovation programme partner
• Greater Birmingham Chambers of Commerce — innovation programme partner

The agency

Rex Commerce® is a service line of AEO-Rex Ltd (Companies House #17018571), registered in England & Wales and operating from Birmingham, West Midlands. AEO-REX offers Answer Engine Optimisation as a standalone service ladder (£0 Free Visibility Scan through £897 quarterly Done For You Citations) for clients who don't need the full agentic-commerce stack. Rex Commerce® is the premium tier of that ladder for businesses ready to be discovered, recommended, and bought from by AI agents end-to-end.