AI search
GEO and AEO: how to show up in AI answers
Short answer: AI assistants recommend businesses whose websites answer questions clearly, whose details are the same everywhere, and that other sites mention. Good SEO is still the foundation. GEO and AEO build on top of it.
What changed
Many people now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity for recommendations, and Google shows AI Overviews above its results. These tools read a handful of sources, write an answer and often cite where it came from. If your site isn't one of those sources, you're missing from the answer.
The terms, in plain English
- SEO, search engine optimisation: ranking in the normal list of results.
- AEO, answer engine optimisation: being the direct answer to a question.
- GEO, generative engine optimisation: being cited in answers written by AI.
What actually helps
- Answer real questions plainly, near the top of the page. “How much does aircon servicing cost?” deserves a clear answer, not a paragraph about your history.
- Keep your business details the same everywhere: name, address, phone, opening hours and prices, on your site, your Google Business Profile and directories.
- Add structured data. Schema.org markup for your business, FAQs, products and articles tells machines exactly what each page is.
- Make pages easy for machines to read: real text that loads with the page, clear headings and fast loading.
- Publish helpful articles regularly, with a date and a named author.
- Get mentioned elsewhere: reviews, local directories and industry sites all count.
- Add an llms.txt file. It's a proposed standard that points AI tools to your key pages. It's cheap to add, though Google has said it doesn't rely on it.
What to avoid
Stuffing pages with keywords, buying links and churning out thin pages. Google's spam policies call mass-produced, low-value pages “scaled content abuse”, and they can pull a whole site down. That's why every article we publish is checked by a person, however often it goes out.
How we handle it
Every site we build gets the search foundations. Our SEO and AI plans add articles, from 4 a month up to one every day, plus the structured data and upkeep that AI answers depend on.