AEO & GEO explained: how to get your business cited by ChatGPT and AI search

A growing slice of the people who'd once have Googled "best plumber near me" or "accountant for small business Leeds" are now typing that same question into ChatGPT, Perplexity or a voice assistant instead. Those tools don't show ten blue links — they read a handful of sources, then give one synthesised answer. If your business isn't one of the sources it reads, you don't get mentioned at all, no matter how well you'd have ranked on page one of Google.

That's the whole reason AEO and GEO exist as disciplines. They're not a rebrand of SEO — they're what SEO needs alongside it now that "search" doesn't only mean a results page.

What AEO and GEO actually mean

Answer-engine optimisation (AEO) is about structuring content so it directly answers a specific question — the way featured snippets and voice assistants have always preferred content that states the answer plainly near the top, in plain language, before the supporting detail.

Generative-engine optimisation (GEO) is broader: it's about making your content the kind of source a large language model actually chooses to cite when it generates an answer. That depends on things classic SEO checklists don't cover — how clearly a page states facts, whether those facts are consistent across your whole site, and whether crawlers belonging to AI companies can even read your pages in the first place.

Three things that move the needle

1. Let the bots in

This sounds obvious, but plenty of sites still block GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended in robots.txt — sometimes by accident, sometimes from an old blanket "block all bots" rule. If a crawler can't read your site, it can't cite it. Check your robots.txt explicitly allows the major AI crawlers before doing anything else.

2. Write the answer before the story

Human-friendly copy often opens with scene-setting. Answer-engine-friendly copy states the fact first — "Standard hosting migrations are free" — then explains the detail underneath. Both audiences read the second paragraph; only one skips straight past it if it's not there.

3. Keep facts consistent everywhere

Pricing, guarantees and policies need to say the same thing on your homepage, your FAQ, your legal pages and your structured data (JSON-LD). Generative models cross-reference; inconsistency reads as unreliability, and unreliable sources don't get cited.

An AI answer engine isn't ranking your page. It's deciding whether to trust it enough to repeat what it says.

Why most agencies sell this as an add-on

AEO and GEO are still new enough that a lot of SEO providers treat them as a premium extra — a line item you pay more for once you've already bought "normal" SEO. We think that's backwards: if a meaningful share of your future customers are asking AI tools instead of typing into Google, optimising for only one of those channels is optimising for yesterday's traffic. It's why answer-engine and generative-engine work is built into every tier of our SEO plans as standard, not sold separately.

Where to start if you're doing it yourself

• Audit your robots.txt — confirm GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are explicitly allowed.
• Add an FAQ section to key pages with direct, one-sentence answers to the questions customers actually ask, marked up with FAQPage schema.
• Keep a single source of truth for pricing and policy copy, and update every page it appears on at the same time.
• Publish a plain-language summary of what your business does and offers — an llms.txt file at your domain root is a simple, low-effort way to do this.