What are AEO and GEO?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) are the work of getting a brand named, accurately, when a buyer asks an AI assistant what to buy. The terms are used almost interchangeably. Classic SEO competes for a position on a list of links; AEO competes for a place in a single synthesised answer that names a handful of brands and leaves the rest out.
How do AI assistants decide which brands to recommend?
They recommend what they can find, understand and verify. In practice that means:
- Pages that answer buyer questions directly, in plain language, near the top of the page.
- Consistent facts about products and the brand across your site, marketplace listings, retailers and reviews.
- Third-party mentions on sources the engines already trust: reviews, comparisons, press and category roundups.
- Machine-readable structure: schema markup, clear headings, FAQ sections and an llms.txt file.
How do you measure whether a brand shows up in AI answers?
With a fixed set of buying questions in the category, asked across the major assistants on a regular cadence. The core metric is share of answer: how often the brand appears, how it is described, and which competitors are named instead. Track which sources the assistants cite, so you know which assets are doing the work, and report AI referral traffic alongside organic search rather than hidden inside it.
How does AEO relate to SEO?
They share foundations, including crawlable pages, clear structure and authoritative links, and most of the work helps both. The differences are in the format (direct answers over keyword-targeted pages), the importance of off-site consistency, and the measurement. A brand ranking well on Google can still be absent from ChatGPT answers, and the reverse is also true.
We run the answer layer: a baseline of what ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity say about your brand today, the content and schema that make you citable, and monthly share-of-answer tracking. See our AEO and GEO services, how an engagement works, or what that looked like for other brands.