What are AEO and GEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) are the disciplines of earning visibility in AI-generated answers. Traditional search ranks pages. AI systems synthesise responses: they retrieve sources, weigh them, and decide which brands to mention, recommend and cite.
Optimising for that comes down to three things:
- Machine comprehension: content structured so AI can extract, understand and quote it accurately.
- Entity clarity: a consistent, unambiguous profile of who you are and what you do, everywhere AI looks.
- Authority signals: mentions, citations, reviews and expert references from the sources LLMs trust.
Why it matters now
Ranking gets you onto the list. AEO gets you into the answer.
Buyers increasingly start research by asking an AI assistant rather than typing into a search box. They ask for comparisons, shortlists and recommendations, and often act on the answer without clicking through to anything. The shortlist shrinks from ten results to a handful of named brands. If you're not one of them, you never entered the consideration set.
The window is open now. Most competitors haven't started, AI answer patterns in most categories are still forming, and consistent authority compounds. The brands that become the default answer in their category this year will be very hard to displace next year.
By the numbers
- Google's AI Overviews have more than 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries and territories, according to Google's July 2025 results.
- Around 1 in 5 Google searches (18%) in March 2025 produced an AI summary, and users clicked a link inside it on just 1% of visits, according to Pew Research Center.
- When a summary appeared, clicks on traditional results fell to 8% of visits, from 15% without one. Being named in the answer matters more than ranking below it.
- There are no special technical requirements for AI Overviews beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, according to Google's guidance on AI features. The difference comes from content, entities and authority.
What we deliver
AI visibility baseline
Systematic testing of the prompts your buyers actually use, across every major AI platform. We record where you appear, where competitors do, and why.
Machine-readable content
Pages restructured for extraction: direct answers, definitional passages, comparison tables, FAQs and schema that let models quote you accurately.
Entity and knowledge graph work
Consistent brand, product and people entities across your site, structured data, knowledge bases, directories and profiles, so AI systems describe you accurately.
Authority and citation building
Earning mentions in the publications, review platforms, communities and data sources that LLMs draw on when forming recommendations.
Answer-first content programme
New content designed around high-value conversational queries, built to be the most citable source on the topics that drive your pipeline.
AI visibility tracking
Ongoing measurement of share of voice, citation frequency and sentiment across AI platforms, reported alongside your search metrics.
Who it's for
- Brands whose buyers research with ChatGPT, Perplexity or AI Overviews before they ever speak to sales
- Category challengers who want to be named alongside, or instead of, the incumbents
- B2B and considered-purchase businesses, where a single shortlist recommendation is worth a great deal
- Teams with solid search foundations who want the next layer of advantage
How we work
Baseline
We map the questions that matter and measure your current AI visibility against competitors.
Diagnose
We identify why AI systems do or don't surface you, whether that's content, entities, authority or technical gaps.
Optimise
We restructure content, strengthen entity signals and build citations in a prioritised programme.
Track
We re-test on a regular cadence and report movement in AI share of voice over time.
It works best alongside LLM Visibility Audit, AI Content Strategy and Search Engine Optimisation.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
SEO optimises for ranked search results. AEO focuses on being the direct answer to a question in featured snippets, voice assistants and AI Overviews. GEO focuses on being retrieved, cited and recommended by generative AI models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. In practice they overlap heavily, and we run them as one integrated strategy.
Can you guarantee our brand will appear in ChatGPT?
No one can honestly guarantee placement in AI answers, because the systems are probabilistic and change frequently. What we can do is materially improve the signals those systems rely on, measure results consistently, and show you the movement over time.
How do you measure AI search visibility?
We track a defined set of buyer prompts across AI platforms on a regular schedule, recording whether you're mentioned, cited or recommended, how you're described, and which sources the answer draws on. That gives you a share-of-voice measure you can track like any other channel.