Answer engine and generative engine optimisation
People increasingly ask an assistant instead of running a search. The job now is to be inside the answer, not ranked beneath it.
Answer engine optimisation, often written AEO, and generative engine optimisation, written GEO, describe the work of making a brand and its content likely to be surfaced, quoted and cited by AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Claude. It overlaps with SEO in its foundations and diverges sharply in what it optimises for.
How it differs from SEO
Classical SEO competes for a position in a list of links. A user then clicks and evaluates. Answer engines instead synthesise a response from multiple sources and often cite only a handful. The competition is no longer for a rank but for inclusion in the synthesis, which rewards content that is factually clear, well structured, easy to extract in fragments, and corroborated elsewhere on the web.
What we do
- Structure content so a machine can lift a clean, correct answer from it
- Implement schema markup, including FAQ, Product, Organisation and Article
- Build genuine entity presence so the brand is recognised as a known thing
- Seek corroboration across the sources these systems actually draw on
- Monitor which assistants mention you, for which prompts, and how accurately
Why it matters commercially
When a buyer asks an assistant which product to choose, being one of the three brands named is worth considerably more than being the ninth organic result on a page they will never open. The window is also unusually open: most competitors have not begun this work, and early entity presence appears to compound.
This page is itself an example. The headings, the definitions and the questions below are structured so a language model can extract a clean answer from them, and the page carries FAQ schema. That is the method, applied to ourselves.
Common questions
What is answer engine optimisation?
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the practice of structuring a brand's content and web presence so that AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity surface and cite it when answering relevant questions. It focuses on inclusion in a synthesised answer rather than a position in a ranked list of links.
What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
SEO optimises for a position in search results. AEO optimises for being the source an answer engine quotes. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is used broadly as a synonym for AEO, with more emphasis on generative systems specifically. All three share technical foundations such as crawlability, structured data and clear content.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend my brand?
No. These systems are non-deterministic and their answers vary by phrasing, user and date. What can be done is to improve the conditions that make citation likely, then measure how often it happens across a tracked set of prompts.
How do you measure AEO results?
We track a defined set of buying-intent prompts across the major assistants, record whether your brand appears and in what terms, and monitor referral traffic that arrives from AI sources. It is a newer measurement discipline than paid media and we are candid about its limits.
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