GEO and AEO: how to show up in AI answers
For twenty years, getting found online meant one thing: ranking on Google. That is changing fast. A growing share of people now get answers straight from AI, whether that is an AI overview at the top of search or a chat assistant that never shows ten blue links at all. Two new acronyms describe the work of showing up there: GEO and AEO. Here is what they mean and how to actually do them.
What GEO and AEO actually mean
GEO, generative engine optimisation, is about being visible inside AI-generated answers, the summaries that engines write by pulling from many sources. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the closely related practice of structuring your content so an engine can lift a clean, correct answer from it. In plain terms: classic SEO helps a page rank, while GEO and AEO help a machine quote you. You need both, because the two worlds overlap and will for years.
Write answers, not just keywords
AI engines reward content that answers a question directly and completely. That means leading with the answer, then explaining, rather than burying the point under three paragraphs of preamble. Use the actual questions your customers ask as headings, and answer each one in a sentence or two before you elaborate. A page built as a set of clear question-and-answer blocks is far easier for a model to quote than a meandering essay.
Structure for machines: clean HTML and schema
Models and crawlers both lean on structure. Semantic, well-formed HTML, one clear heading hierarchy, and schema markup such as FAQPage, Article, and Organization all help an engine understand what your content is and trust it enough to cite. None of this is exotic; it is the same hygiene that has always helped SEO, now with higher stakes.
Speed and accessibility matter here too. If a page is slow or a mess to parse, it is less likely to be crawled deeply and quoted accurately.
Earn citations and entity trust
AI engines favour sources they consider authoritative. That comes from the unglamorous fundamentals: a consistent name, address, and details across the web, genuine mentions and links from reputable sites, clear authorship, and content that is accurate and kept current. Think of it as building a reputation a machine can verify, not gaming a ranking.
Measure what you can
Attribution is harder in an AI world: an engine may quote you without sending a click. Watch for branded search growth, referral traffic from AI products, and simply whether the assistants name you when asked about your space. It is early, and the tooling is catching up, but ignoring the channel because it is hard to measure is how you get left out of the answer entirely.
The brands that win the next few years will be the ones that are easy for both people and machines to understand, quote, and trust. The work is not mysterious, it is just newly urgent.