AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are the work of making your business easy for AI assistants and AI search features to understand, trust and cite. In practice that means clear facts about who you are, pages that answer real questions directly, and technical foundations AI systems can read. It builds on good SEO rather than replacing it.
People now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot or Google's AI Overviews a question and read one synthesised answer. If your business appears in that answer, you want the description to be accurate and, ideally, linked.
What AEO and GEO mean, and how they differ from SEO
AEO grew out of featured snippets and voice search: structuring content so a system can lift a direct answer. GEO is the newer term for influencing how large language models summarise and cite sources when they generate an answer. The two overlap so much that most teams treat them as one discipline.
Traditional SEO aims to rank a page in a list of links. AEO and GEO aim to make your page the source an AI system relies on for its answer. The foundations are shared: crawlable pages, clear content and signals of trust. The difference is more weight on precise, self-contained statements and consistent facts across the web.
How AI systems choose what to cite
No provider publishes a full recipe, and behaviour differs between systems. What is broadly understood is that many assistants retrieve pages from a search index or their own crawl at question time, then write an answer from the passages found. A page must be retrievable, readable and relevant before it can be cited.
A few factors tend to help. Passages that answer a question in the first sentence or two are easier to extract. Facts that match what other reputable sources say are easier to trust. Pages that clearly belong to an identifiable organisation, with an author, a date and contact details, tell the system who is speaking.
A practical checklist for your website
Work through these in order; the early items cost least and fix the commonest gaps.
Entity clarity: state on your home and About pages exactly what the business does, who it serves and where it operates. Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere.
Answer-first pages: give each core service its own page that opens with a direct definition, then covers process, scope, timelines and cost drivers.
Real questions: collect the questions customers ask in calls, emails and sales meetings. Answer each on the relevant page in a short paragraph that starts with the answer.
Structured data: add Organization, Service and Article markup in JSON-LD, plus FAQPage or Product where it genuinely fits. The markup must match what visitors can see on the page.
Crawl access: make sure key content is in the HTML the server returns, not only rendered by JavaScript, which some crawlers may not run. Check that robots.txt is not blocking crawlers you want to reach you.
Internal links: connect related services, guides and case studies with descriptive link text so relationships are explicit.
Off-site consistency: keep your Google Business Profile, directories, LinkedIn and industry listings aligned with your website. Conflicting details give an AI system a reason to hedge or repeat the wrong version.
Decisions and trade-offs
Training versus retrieval crawlers: several AI providers document separate crawlers for model training and for live search. You can often block training while allowing retrieval, but check each provider's current documentation before editing robots.txt, because names and behaviour change.
Answers versus clicks: a good AI answer may satisfy the user without a visit. That is a fair trade for simple facts if your brand is named. Where a quote or consultation is needed, make the next step obvious so the cited page converts those who do click.
Gated content: whitepapers behind forms generate leads but cannot be cited. Publish a substantial summary openly and gate only the full version.
New conventions: proposals such as an llms.txt file exist, but support among the major AI providers is not established. Treat them as low-cost experiments, not priorities.
Common mistakes to avoid
Writing for machines: keyword-stuffed or padded pages are harder to quote, not easier. AI systems favour passages that say one thing clearly.
Mass-producing thin pages: near-identical AI-written pages add little information, dilute your stronger pages and may breach search engine policies on scaled content.
Schema that does not match the page: marking up reviews, prices or FAQs that visitors cannot see is likely to be ignored and can be treated as spam.
Unverifiable claims: phrases such as "leading provider" give an AI system nothing to repeat. Concrete facts about services, locations, process and named work are more quotable.
Hiding key facts: prices, service areas and contact details placed only in images, PDFs or pop-ups are easy for a crawler to miss.
How to measure progress
Measurement here is still immature, so combine several signals.
Prompt testing: keep a fixed list of questions your customers would realistically ask. Run them monthly in the main assistants and record whether you are mentioned, how accurately and which page is cited.
Referral traffic: assistants that link to sources appear as referrals in analytics under their own domains. Track them separately, with their landing pages.
Enquiry source: add a "How did you hear about us?" question to forms and calls, with AI assistants as an option. Self-reported answers catch journeys that analytics cannot.
Index coverage: use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to confirm the pages you want cited are indexed, because several assistants draw on traditional search indexes.
Expect variation. The same question can produce different answers on different days, so judge trends over months.
How Softweb Planet can help
Our AEO & GEO (AI Search Optimisation) work sits alongside our SEO Services and Web Application Development, so content, structured data and technical fixes are handled by one team. No agency can promise that an AI assistant will cite you. What we can do is remove the reasons it would not.
Engagements start with a discovery call about your services, markets and how AI assistants currently describe you, followed by a written proposal with a clear scope. Costs depend on scope; we give a fixed quote after discovery.
Every project has a named lead, a written scope and working software to review every one to two weeks, such as updated templates, schema and content on a staging site. We work with clients in the UK, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and internationally from our UK office and Lahore headquarters.