What is AEO and GEO?

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are how you get your brand quoted and cited by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, not just ranked in a list of links.

By Sushmit Sarmah, founder of GrowthHeron · Last updated

Why do AEO and GEO matter now?

More buyers now ask an AI assistant for recommendations before they search or click. If the assistant doesn't know your brand, or describes it wrongly, you are invisible at the moment of decision.

AEO and GEO build on good SEO: fast, crawlable, trustworthy pages. They add a focus on answers that can be lifted verbatim, clear entities and structured data, and on being referenced across the web.

How do you optimize for AI answer engines?

  1. Lead with the answer

    Open each page and section with a one or two sentence answer, then expand. Engines quote the first clear statement.

  2. Use question-style headings

    Write H2s as the questions buyers actually ask: “What is…”, “How does…”, “How much…”.

  3. Add structured data

    Mark up Organization, FAQPage, Article, Product or SoftwareApplication with JSON-LD that matches the visible content.

  4. Be crawlable by AI bots

    Server-render content and allow crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended in robots.txt.

  5. Publish an llms.txt

    Offer a plain-markdown summary of your product and key pages at /llms.txt so language models can understand you quickly.

  6. Keep entities consistent

    Describe your brand the same way everywhere: name, category, audience and what it does, in one definitional sentence.

  7. Earn mentions

    Get cited in communities, comparisons and reviews. Generative engines lean on sources that others reference.

  8. Measure AI visibility

    Track brand mentions and citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini for your core buyer questions.

AEO & GEO questions

AEO is the practice of structuring content so answer engines, such as Google's featured snippets, voice assistants and AI chat assistants, can pull a direct, accurate answer from it. It favours clear questions as headings, a concise answer in the first sentence or two, and structured data.

GEO is the practice of increasing how often generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews mention and cite your brand when they generate answers. It focuses on being a clear, consistent, well-structured and widely referenced source.

SEO aims to rank pages in a list of search results and earn clicks. AEO and GEO aim to be the source an engine quotes or summarises in its answer. The foundations overlap (crawlable, fast, trustworthy content), but AEO and GEO put more weight on extractable answers, entity clarity and citations.

By regularly asking AI assistants the questions your buyers ask and recording whether your brand is mentioned, how it is described and which of your pages are cited, then tracking that share of voice over time.

GrowthHeron researches the questions your ideal customers ask, drafts answer-first articles with FAQ and HowTo structured data, and tracks whether AI engines mention your brand, so you can see your AI search visibility improve.

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