GEO and AEO: How to Get Your Business Cited by AI Search

More people now ask an AI assistant before they ask a search engine. ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini and Grok all answer questions directly and, when they do it well, name and link the sources they relied on. For a business, being one of those named sources is the new version of ranking on page one.

Two terms have appeared for this work. GEO (generative engine optimisation) is about being included and cited when an AI writes an answer. AEO (answer engine optimisation) is about structuring content so it can be lifted as the direct answer to a question. In practice they overlap heavily, and both sit on top of ordinary SEO rather than replacing it.

How AI answers choose their sources

Each engine works differently and none publishes a full recipe, but the broad pattern is consistent and observable:

1. Retrieval. Most assistants run a web search (their own index, Bing, Google or a mix) for the question and a few rephrased versions of it.
2. Selection. From the results they pull the passages that answer the question most clearly and that come from sources they consider reliable.
3. Synthesis. The model writes an answer from those passages and, in most products, shows the pages it used as citations.

That has a practical consequence: if your page is not crawlable and not reasonably visible in normal search, it is rarely retrieved, so it cannot be cited. GEO starts with technical SEO.

1. Make sure AI crawlers can reach you

Check that your robots.txt does not block the crawlers you want to be found by. OpenAI (OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot), Perplexity (PerplexityBot), Anthropic (ClaudeBot), Google (Googlebot, with Google-Extended controlling some AI uses) and Microsoft (Bingbot) each publish their user agents. Decide deliberately which ones you allow, rather than inheriting a blanket block from a plugin or a security setting.

Then confirm the basics that every crawler relies on:

• Important content is in the HTML, not only rendered by JavaScript after load.
• Pages return a 200 status, have one canonical URL and are listed in your XML sitemap.
• Pages load quickly and are not hidden behind cookie walls, logins or interstitials.
• Your site is indexed in Bing as well as Google, because several assistants lean on Bing's index.

2. Write answers that can be quoted

AI systems lift passages, not whole pages. Content that is easy to quote tends to share a few traits:

• Question-led headings. Use the questions customers actually ask ("How long does local SEO take?") as H2 or H3 headings.
• Answer first. Put a direct, two-to-three sentence answer straight under the heading, then expand with detail, steps and exceptions.
• Self-contained passages. Each section should make sense on its own, without "as mentioned above".
• Specifics. Name the product, the place, the price range, the time frame and the conditions. Vague copy gives a model nothing worth citing.
• Lists and tables for steps, comparisons and criteria, because they map cleanly onto answer formats.

A useful test: read one section aloud with no context. If it fully answers a real customer question, it is quotable. If it only makes sense as part of the page, rewrite it.

3. Show who you are (entity signals)

Assistants prefer sources they can identify and verify. Make your business an unambiguous entity:

• Keep your name, address, phone number and description consistent across your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, LinkedIn and the directories that matter in your industry.
• Publish a real About page with the people behind the business, their experience and how to contact you.
• Put author names and short bios on articles, and link them to the author's profile.
• Add Organization structured data with sameAs links to your official profiles.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Your Business",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "logo": "https://www.example.com/logo.png",
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/company/your-business",
    "https://www.facebook.com/yourbusiness"
  ]
}
</script>

Structured data does not guarantee a citation, but it removes ambiguity about who you are and what each page is about. Use Article, FAQPage, Product, LocalBusiness and HowTo markup only where they truthfully describe the page.

4. Earn mentions on sites AI already trusts

When an assistant answers "best X in Y" or "which company does Z", it often draws on comparison articles, industry directories, review platforms, forums and news coverage. Being mentioned in those places is a strong signal, sometimes stronger than anything on your own site. Useful, honest activity here includes:

• Getting listed, accurately, in the directories and review sites your customers actually use.
• Collecting genuine reviews and replying to them.
• Contributing expert comments to industry publications and local news.
• Answering questions in relevant communities without spamming links.

5. Keep content current

Many questions have a time element: prices, rules, product versions, opening hours. Show a visible "last updated" date, actually review key pages on a schedule, and remove or redirect pages that are out of date. A stale page that contradicts a newer source is unlikely to be cited.

6. Measure what you can

AI visibility is harder to measure than rankings, but you are not blind:

• In GA4, look at referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com, gemini.google.com and similar domains.
• Google Search Console includes AI Overviews and AI Mode impressions within normal Search performance data.
• Keep a fixed list of 20 to 30 real customer questions and check monthly which brands each assistant names. Record it in a spreadsheet so you can see the trend.
• Ask new leads how they found you, and add "an AI assistant" as an option.

What not to do

• Do not publish hundreds of thin AI-written pages targeting every question variant. They rarely get retrieved and can drag down the whole site.
• Do not add structured data that does not match the visible page.
• Do not hide text for AI crawlers or show them different content from users.
• Do not stop doing SEO. Retrieval still depends on it.

A 30-day starting plan

1. Week 1: Audit robots.txt, indexing in Google and Bing, page speed and canonical tags on your top pages.
2. Week 2: List the 20 questions customers ask most. Map each to an existing page or a gap.
3. Week 3: Rewrite your five most important pages with question-led headings and answer-first sections. Add Organization and relevant page-level schema.
4. Week 4: Fix your business listings and profiles for consistency, ask recent customers for reviews, and record your baseline in AI assistants.

If you would like a second pair of eyes, our AI search optimisation service covers all of this, and the free SEO audit is a good place to start: it shows the technical issues that would stop AI engines from finding you in the first place.