What are GEO and AEO? AI search optimisation, explained simply

What is GEO — optimisation for generative engines?

A classic search engine returns a list of links. A generative engine reads your question, gathers several sources, summarises them and writes you an answer — with three to five links to the sources it used. That is what ChatGPT with web search, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI Overviews do today, and the latter are gradually rolling out across Europe.

GEO is everything you do to be among those few sources. Three conditions must hold: AI crawlers must actually reach your site, they must understand the content without guessing, and they must judge it reliable enough to cite.

The name is new; the conditions are not. A site that is technically accessible, clearly structured and honest in its content was already good for Google. GEO mainly adds a handful of technical details — covered below.

What is AEO — optimisation for answer engines?

AEO focuses on one thing: that the questions customers actually ask have a short, direct answer on your site. Not in the sixth paragraph, not hidden behind a "read more" button, but where a machine finds it in the first second.

In practice that means subheadings phrased as questions, a first paragraph beneath each that answers in two or three sentences, and an FAQ section that is also marked up machine-readably (the FAQPage schema). None of this is a trick — it is simply the form in which both hurried people and AI systems read. The schema does not guarantee rich results or a citation in an AI answer; what matters is that the answers are visible on the page and correct.

Tip: A simple test: open your site and try to find the answers to "how much does it cost" and "where do you operate" within 10 seconds. If you cannot, neither can an AI.

SEO, AEO and GEO — what is the difference?

The differences are easiest to see side by side:

Is SEO dying? What Google itself says

No. The most direct answer is in Google's own guide to AI features in Search: AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same search index and the same core signals as regular search, and Google states explicitly that no special, additional optimisation is needed to appear in them. What makes a site good for search makes it good for AI.

So why all the noise? Because where the visitor lands has changed. If the AI answers instead of you, there is no click to your site — unless it cites you as a source. The contest is no longer just for a ranking but for a citation. And there are technical obstacles here that classic SEO never had.

Google's guide adds two more things: write content for people, not for AI — text stuffed "for machines" harms both — and rely not on tricks but on unique, first-hand content: your own experience, examples, images.

What is genuinely new in GEO — three technical conditions

Subtract what was already good practice and three conditions remain that SEO never knew and that most often decide the outcome in practice:

• Access for AI crawlers. Every provider runs its own crawlers, and robots.txt must allow them. A common trap: the hosting security system silently blocks crawlers even though robots.txt is correct. We describe this in detail in Why ChatGPT doesn't know you.
• Content in the source code. Many AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. If a page assembles its content in the browser, the crawler sees an empty shell. Check with Ctrl+U: if a sentence from the page is not in the source, it is not there for AI either.
• Machine-readable facts. schema.org markup (who you are, where you operate, what you offer, at what price) gives the system facts without guessing. That guessing is exactly why an AI sometimes gets a business wrong.

Tip: The llms.txt file you will see in offers is a proposed convention, not an established standard — no provider guarantees reading it. Since it is cheap and harmless it is worth having; it is not a reason for a separate fee.

How to check whether you are already in AI search

No tools needed, just five minutes:

• Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity the way a customer would: "Who offers [your service] in [your town]?" See who gets named and whether you are among them.
• Ask by name: "What does [your company] offer?" Check whether the facts are correct — price, location, services.
• Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for the crawler names from the table above. If they are absent, the general rules apply to them — rules possibly written for an entirely different purpose.
• View the page source (Ctrl+U) and search for a sentence from your page.

If you would rather not, or are not sure what you saw, we run this check free of charge — see below.

How much does GEO or AEO optimisation cost?

Caution is warranted here, because the market is currently also selling hot air. An honest framework, in our view, looks like this:

Nothing, if the site already stands on good foundations — access, structure, structured data. Many well-built sites are already AI-ready and need at most a check.

A few hundred euros for analysis and fixes if the foundations are there but details are missing: a blocked crawler, absent schema, content without clear answers. With us the quick check is free, the full analysis with a report and priorities costs €290 + VAT, and implementing the measures starts at €390 + VAT depending on scope.

A redesign, if the site builds its content in the browser, has no structure or is empty of substance. Here GEO is not a separate service but part of redesigning the website.

What nobody can honestly sell you: a guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend you. Answers are produced by systems that no provider controls. What can be guaranteed are the conditions — and those are entirely in your hands.