The rise of AEO and GEO

If you’ve typed a question into Google recently, there’s a decent chance you read the summary at the top and closed the tab. Ask ChatGPT who to hire and it’ll give you names rather than ten websites to compare. A growing share of searches now end inside a generated answer, whether that’s Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity or whichever assistant came with your phone. The page that used to rank first might now get, at best, a small citation link.

The industry took a while to name this, then named it twice. AEO and GEO overlap and often get used as if they mean the same thing. But they came from different places and ask slightly different things of you.

First came the answer engine

Google had been heading this way for a decade. Featured snippets pulled a paragraph from a page and put it above the results, and voice assistants read that paragraph out loud. AEO, or answer engine optimisation, grew up around this. It’s about structuring your content so a search engine can lift a clean, accurate answer from it and credit you.

In practice, it rewards writing the way people ask questions. Use the question as the heading, answer it directly in the first sentence underneath, then add the detail. Be specific, too. “A brand identity project takes around three weeks” is something an engine can quote. “Timelines vary depending on scope” isn’t.

Structured data helps machines understand what each part of a page is, such as your organisation details, a product or a set of FAQs. It’s worth knowing that Google limited FAQ rich results to government and health sites in 2023 and dropped HowTo results altogether. Markup still helps machines read your page, but it won’t get you those special search listings any more.

Then the engines started writing

ChatGPT changed people’s habits before it changed the technology. People got used to asking a full question and accepting a written reply. Claude, Gemini and Perplexity followed, along with Google’s AI Overviews. These tools write their own answer, using a mix of what they learned in training and what they look up when you ask.

GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is about making sure those models understand your brand well enough to mention it. When a founder asks “who are the good branding studios for a £10k budget in London?”, you want your name to be one the model has a reason to give.

That’s a wider brief than AEO. It covers what other websites say about you, whether your details match everywhere they appear, and whether your positioning is clear enough for a model to sum it up in one sentence. It also depends on whether you turn up in the places these models seem to rely on, like reviews, directories, press coverage and well-linked comparison articles. A model is unlikely to recommend a company it can’t form a clear picture of.

Why they arrived together

AEO is mostly about what’s on your own pages. GEO is closer to reputation, meaning what the wider web says about you. Both depend on being clear. A page that answers a question directly works for the engine that quotes it and for the model that looks it up. A brand described the same way on its own site, on LinkedIn, in a directory and in a press piece gives a model something consistent to learn from. The two grew at the same time because they come from the same change in behaviour: people asking questions instead of browsing.

There aren’t any shortcuts

Some early GEO advice was really about gaming the system, with fake citations, invented statistics and pages written to sound like a chatbot. Treat that the way you’d treat keyword stuffing. Real sources and real figures are a different matter. The 2023 study that coined the term GEO found that adding genuine statistics, quotes and citations made pages more likely to appear in AI-generated answers. What works is fairly boring: say true, specific things about what you do, in the form people ask about it, everywhere it matters.

What to do about it

For most small and mid-sized businesses, four steps cover most of it.

Start by rewriting your key pages as answers. That usually means your services, pricing, process and about pages. Each one should open with the question a buyer actually asks and answer it in the first line. Add FAQ sections where the questions really do come up often.

Next, make sure your details match everywhere: your name, location, what you do, who you do it for and what it costs. Check that every profile and listing says the same thing. If your details conflict, a model has less reason to mention you with any confidence.

Then work on getting other people to describe you. That could be a guest article, a case study on a client’s site or reviews on a platform people trust. What others say about you tends to count for more with AI tools than anything on your own website. This step takes the longest, so start it early.

Finally, ask the tools yourself. Type your category into ChatGPT and Perplexity and see who comes up. Try a few different phrasings, because the answers change between runs. Whatever comes back is your baseline, so run the same questions again every few months.

Frequently asked questions

What is AEO?

Answer engine optimisation. It means structuring your content so search features like featured snippets and voice assistants can pull a direct answer from it and credit you.

What is GEO?

Generative engine optimisation. It means making your brand, details and positioning clear enough that AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews mention and cite you in their answers.

Why have AEO and GEO appeared now?

Because people’s habits have changed. Once people started asking AI assistants full questions and trusting the written reply, a business missing from that reply was missing from the decision. SEO still matters, but on its own it no longer reaches the moment people choose.