AEO & GEO: Getting Your Brand Cited by AI, Not Just Ranked by Google
Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization are one job under two names: structuring your content so AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and Gemini can extract it, trust it, and cite your brand by name in the answers they write. We do that on top of your existing SEO, not instead of it.
What Does AEO and GEO Work Actually Involve?
Six pieces of work, all of them things a machine has to be able to read. None of them are new inventions. They are the parts of SEO that answer engines happen to reward most, done deliberately rather than by accident.
Answer-First Content Restructuring
AI systems lift the passage that answers the question, not the page that ranks best. So every target page opens by answering its own question completely in the first two or three sentences, before any preamble, and the supporting detail follows underneath. This page is written the same way, deliberately: the definition sits above the fold because that is the block a model can quote without editing it.
Question-Based Headings & FAQ Structuring
People ask AI tools full questions, so the headings become full questions too. Each one is followed by a short, self-contained answer that makes sense lifted out of context, then marked up as an FAQ so the question and its answer stay paired for a parser. Three to seven questions per page, kept genuinely useful rather than padded out to hit a count.
Structured Data for Machine Readers
Worth being straight about this one: Google says no special markup is needed to appear in AI Overviews, and the published studies disagree sharply on how much schema moves citations. What is not disputed is that accurate Organization, Article, FAQPage and Product markup tells a machine what your page is, who published it, and how its facts connect. That is exactly what an answer engine needs in order to verify a claim before repeating it. We implement it because it is cheap and correct, not because anyone can promise it buys citations.
Topical Authority & Quotable Facts
Models cite sources they encounter repeatedly and can corroborate elsewhere. That means depth on a defined subject rather than one page per keyword, plus specifics worth quoting: named figures, dated statements, clear definitions, original data where you have it. Vague marketing copy is unquotable, so it gets skipped in favour of whoever wrote something concrete.
AI Visibility & Citation Monitoring
You cannot manage what nobody is measuring. We track how your brand is described across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for the prompts your buyers actually use, log which of your pages get cited, and note where a competitor is named instead of you. That log is the report, not a score out of a hundred.
Built on Your Existing SEO, Not Instead of It
AEO and GEO are not a replacement for SEO, and any agency selling them that way is selling you something twice. Answer engines crawl the same pages Google crawls. If a page is blocked, slow, thin or contradicted elsewhere on your own site, no amount of restructuring gets it quoted. The foundations from technical SEO and on-page SEO still have to hold; this work sits on top of them and aims at a different kind of result.
What Do You Receive From an AEO and GEO Engagement?
No score out of a hundred, because nobody outside these companies can compute one honestly. What you get instead is a record of how you are described, the pages reshaped to change it, and the log that shows whether it worked.
- A baseline record of how each AI tool currently describes your brand
- A prompt set built from real buyer questions, not keyword exports
- Answer-first rewrites of your highest-value pages
- Question-based headings with FAQ markup, validated before it ships
- Organization, Article and Product schema kept consistent with the copy
- A monthly citation log: what got quoted, what did not, who replaced you
The gold block is what an answer engine lifts. Everything below it is what convinces a human to keep reading.
How Does an AEO and GEO Engagement Run?
Four stages. The first and the last are the same measurement, run before and after, which is the only way to tell whether any of the middle mattered.
Audit Current AI Visibility
We run the prompts your buyers actually type into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and record what comes back: whether you are named, which page is cited, how accurately you are described, and who is being recommended instead. That baseline is what everything afterwards is measured against.
Restructure the Content That Matters
The pages with the most commercial value get rewritten answer-first: the question settled in the opening sentences, headings turned into real questions, and each section made to stand on its own when lifted out. Nothing is padded, because length is not what gets a passage quoted.
Implement Schema and Structured Data
Organization, Article, FAQPage and, where relevant, Product markup, validated and kept consistent with what the page actually says. Contradictions between markup and visible copy are worse than no markup at all, so we fix those first.
Monitor Citations and Mentions
The prompt set is re-run on a schedule and the results logged over time: new citations, lost ones, changes in how you are described, competitors gaining ground. Where the answer is wrong about you, we trace which page taught it that and fix the source.
How Does This Fit With the SEO We Already Do?
Fair questions to ask before paying anyone for a service with two acronyms and eighteen months of history.
Is AEO different from GEO, or are they the same thing?
In practice they describe the same work. AEO grew out of optimising for direct answers such as featured snippets, voice results and People Also Ask, while GEO was coined for generative systems that write an answer from several sources. The techniques converged: answer clearly, structure it so a machine can lift it, and be corroborated elsewhere. We treat them as one service because splitting them would mean charging twice for the same deliverables.
Does this replace the content work we already pay for?
No, it changes how that content is shaped. The research, the topical planning and the publishing cadence in content marketing stay exactly as they are. What changes is that each piece leads with its answer instead of building up to it, and carries the markup that lets a parser pair the question with the response.
What if the AI tools are already describing us wrongly?
That is common and usually traceable. Models repeat what they read most consistently, so a wrong answer normally comes from an outdated page of yours, a stale directory listing, or a competitor comparison page nobody at your company has read. We find the source, correct or outrank it, and re-run the prompts to confirm the description has moved. An SEO audit is often where those contradictions surface first.
AEO and GEO Questions
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are the practice of structuring content so AI systems quote it and name your brand in the answers they generate. Traditional SEO competes for a position in a list of links; AEO and GEO compete to be the source an answer is built from. The underlying work overlaps heavily, covering crawlable pages, accurate markup and genuine authority, but the target is a citation rather than a click.
You check directly, by running the questions your buyers ask and reading what comes back. There is no Search Console for AI answers, so visibility has to be sampled rather than reported. We maintain a fixed prompt set per client, run it on a schedule across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, and log which pages are cited, how the brand is described, and which competitors appear instead. Some referral traffic from these tools also shows up in analytics, but it undercounts badly, because most AI answers are read without anyone clicking through.
If your SEO is solid you are already most of the way there, and the honest answer is that this is an extension rather than a new department. Answer engines crawl the same pages Google does, so technical health, indexability and authority still decide whether you are eligible at all. What good SEO does not automatically give you is content shaped to be lifted: an answer in the opening sentences, headings phrased as questions, and facts specific enough to quote. That reshaping is the whole job.
Expect a first read within four to eight weeks of the restructured pages being live, and a clearer picture across three to six months. The variance is high and worth being upfront about: models refresh on their own schedules, some pull live search results while others answer from training data that lags by months, and none of them publish a recrawl timetable. Pages that were already ranking well tend to surface fastest, because the crawling and trust were in place before the reshaping started.
What This Work Sits On Top Of
Find Out What AI Is Already Saying About You
Send us your domain. Within two business days we will come back with how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews currently describe your brand, which of your pages they cite, and who is being named instead of you.
Response within two business days. No contracts, no obligation.