A buyer who once typed “best invoicing software” into a search box and opened five tabs now often asks an assistant and reads one answer. That answer names a handful of products, sometimes with links. If yours is not among them, the buyer may never see your site. This is the shift behind two acronyms you will keep meeting: AEO and GEO.
What the terms mean
AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It is the work of making your content easy for answer engines to find, understand and use when they respond to a question. Answer engines here means Perplexity, ChatGPT with search, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Claude with web search, and Gemini with Google Search grounding.
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. The term was formalized in a 2023 research paper titled “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (arXiv 2311.09735). The authors describe generative engines as systems that gather information from several sources and summarize it with a language model, and they note that content creators have little control over when and how their content is shown. You will also see “LLMO” and “AI search optimization”. In practice the labels are interchangeable. What matters is the goal: to be present in the answer.
How an AI answer differs from a results page
A results page is a ranked list. Position one gets the most attention, but position seven still gets visits. An AI answer is written text with a few names in it and, for engines that search, a few linked sources. There is no page two. For a given question you are either in the answer or you are not.
That produces two separate outcomes worth tracking:
- Mention. The answer names your brand in its text.
- Citation. The answer links to a page on your domain as a source.
One can happen without the other. An engine can name you because it learned about you from third-party pages, without linking to you. It can also draw on your documentation to write a generic answer and never say your name.
Engines also work in two modes. Some answers come from the model’s memory, with no live sources and no citations. Others use a web search tool: the engine turns the question into search queries, reads results and cites what it used. Which mode you get depends on the engine and the question. Our guide on how engines choose sources goes through each one.
Why this matters for a brand
We do not have a trustworthy number for how many of your buyers ask assistants before they buy, and nobody outside the vendors does. The pattern is still easy to see. Engines answer “best tool for X” and “X vs Y” questions directly, and the brands in that answer get the consideration. Being missing from page two of a results list is a missed opportunity. Being missing from the answer is invisibility for that question.
There is a second risk. Answers also summarize what the web says about you. If an old pricing page or a third-party review is out of date, the engine repeats it with confidence.
What influences whether you appear
No engine publishes a ranking formula, and anyone who promises one is guessing. The vendors’ documentation does point to a few things that count.
- Access. The crawlers behind the search indexes must be allowed. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers. You can check your own setup with the AI crawler check.
- Being in the index the engine searches. Google’s guidance says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that there are no additional requirements.
- Pages that answer the question. Engines rewrite a buyer’s question into narrower searches about pricing, alternatives, comparisons and integrations. A page that answers one of those directly gives the engine something to use.
- Corroboration elsewhere. Reviews, directories, roundups and documentation that mention you give engines more than one place to learn who you are. Expect third-party pages to be cited alongside, or instead of, your own.
- Current facts. For questions about now, such as pricing and features, pages that are visibly up to date are safer sources.
- A consistent name and description. Use the same company name, category and one-line description everywhere you are listed.
What AEO is not
It is not a trick. Hidden text aimed at language models is manipulation, not optimization, and it puts your reputation at risk if it is found. It is not a guarantee: answers vary from run to run and engines change without notice. And it does not replace SEO. Google’s AI features link to pages from its own index, so the fundamentals of being crawlable, indexed and useful still apply.
Where to start
- Measure first. Run a free scan to see whether engines mention or cite you for the questions your buyers ask, and which competitors they name instead.
- Check access. Use the AI crawler check to see which crawlers your robots.txt allows.
- Publish a guide for agents. An llms.txt file is cheap to make. Read the llms.txt guide before you expect much from it.
- Fix the gaps the scan shows. Write the missing comparison page, update the stale pricing, and scan again. The measurement guide explains how to read the numbers over time.