For twenty years, search optimisation meant one thing: earn a position on a page of ten blue links. That page is no longer where the decision happens. A buyer asks ChatGPT which provider to shortlist, reads a Google AI Overview instead of clicking, or has Perplexity summarise four competitors in a paragraph. The click you were optimising for never occurs — but the recommendation still does.
AEO and GEO, defined without the hype
AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — is about being the answer: featured snippets, voice results, and the direct response at the top of the page. GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is about being the cited source inside a generated answer from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Copilot. They are different surfaces with the same underlying requirement: content a machine can retrieve, understand and attribute with confidence.
What actually earns a citation
- Self-contained sections. If a paragraph only makes sense after reading the three above it, it cannot be lifted into an answer. Every section should survive being read alone.
- Answer-first structure. State the answer in one sentence, then the supporting detail, then the caveat. Models quote the first sentence.
- Unambiguous entity data. One legal name, one description, consistent across your site, schema, Wikidata, LinkedIn and industry directories. If assistants cannot resolve who you are, they cite someone they can.
- Pages that already rank. AI answers overwhelmingly cite content that is already crawlable and already performing. Technical SEO is the entry fee, not an alternative.
What does not work
Stuffing an FAQ block onto every page. Publishing llms.txt and calling it an AI strategy. Writing for a model instead of a reader — the assistants are trained on human-quality text, and thin content reads as thin to both. There is no keyword-density equivalent here, and anyone selling you one is guessing.
How to measure it
Not with a ranking number. Build a fixed set of prompts that mirror real buying questions, run them monthly across each assistant, and record whether you were cited, what was quoted, and which competitors appeared instead. It is a share-of-voice measure. Across our engagements, the first tracked citation typically lands 8 to 14 weeks after the restructuring work ships.
Where to start
Take your ten highest-intent pages and read each section aloud on its own. If it does not stand up without context, rewrite it so it does. That single exercise does more for AI visibility than any file you can add to your web root.