What is AEO/GEO? A plain-English introduction
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) describe the same shift from two angles: people increasingly get answers, not links. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini for a recommendation, the assistant composes a single answer — and your brand is either in it or it isn't.
From ranking to being the answer
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten blue links. Answer engines don't show a list; they synthesize one response from the sources they can read and trust. That changes the goal: instead of ranking first, you want to be understood, trusted and quoted.
What AEO means in practice
Answer Engine Optimization focuses on making your content easy to lift into an answer:
- Pages that answer one clear question near the top, not after ten paragraphs of preamble.
- Headings that mirror how people actually ask questions.
- FAQ sections and structured data (Schema.org) that label what each block of content is.
What GEO adds
Generative Engine Optimization looks at the wider signals a generative model weighs when it picks sources to cite:
- A consistent brand entity: the same name, description and links everywhere.
- Authority markers such as authors, dates, sources and credentials.
- Technical access: if GPTBot or PerplexityBot is blocked in robots.txt, you are invisible by choice.
AEO vs SEO: complementary, not opposed
Nothing about AEO breaks classic SEO — clear structure, fast pages and trustworthy content help both. The difference is the success metric: SEO measures clicks from a results page, AEO/GEO measures whether AI answers mention and cite you at all.
Where to start
Start by measuring. Run a free audit of your website, see which of the core signals you already send, and fix the gaps in order of impact. Most sites fail on the basics — missing structured data, vague titles, blocked AI crawlers — and those are exactly the cheapest things to fix.