What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
How AI assistants choose which sources to cite, and what you can change.
On this page
Short answer
Answer engine optimization (AEO) means building a page so that a search engine or an AI assistant can pull a ready answer out of it. “Answer engine” covers every product that responds to a question with the answer itself rather than with ten links: featured snippets and AI Overviews in Google, voice assistants, ChatGPT, Perplexity. Most AEO work happens on the page: how the question is phrased and how the reply under it is written.
Where these answers appear
| Where | What it takes from a page | What you can see afterwards |
|---|---|---|
| Featured snippet in Google | a short paragraph, list or table placed under a fitting heading | clicks and impressions for the query in Search Console (snippets are not reported on their own) |
| AI Overviews in Google | facts and wording from a few pages, with links | a link inside the overview, now and then a visit |
| ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini with web search | facts, lists, recommendations, often with links | a mention or a linked source, and fewer visits than a normal result |
| Voice assistants | one spoken reply | in most cases nothing measurable |
These answers often lean on pages that already rank, so AEO tends to pay off on pages Google already shows. Treat that as a rule of thumb: assistants do sometimes quote pages from beyond the first page.
AEO, GEO and SEO side by side
- SEO puts the page into search results.
- AEO makes it easy to take a clean answer from that page.
- GEO works on getting the brand named in AI replies, including through other websites. Our GEO guide covers that part.
- LLM SEO also looks at what language models already know about the brand from training. See our LLM SEO guide.
Checklist for a single page
Pick one page built around one main question and go through these points:
- Phrase the heading as the question
Use your customers’ words: “How much does a website audit cost?” works better than “Pricing information”.
- Answer straight away
Two or three sentences that fully answer the heading, before any background. Details come after.
- Give numbers their context
A line such as “from [your price], ready in [your number] business days, as of [month year]” can be quoted.
Read more
“Affordable and fast” cannot.
- Steps as a numbered list, comparisons and prices as a table
Both formats get reused often.
- Keep one page to one main question
A page that tries to cover ten questions answers each of them poorly.
- Write definitions that stand alone
A sentence like “X is …” that makes sense out of context is easy to quote.
- Keep numbers consistent across pages
When the service page and the price list disagree, an engine may quote the wrong figure or skip both.
- Make sure the text loads without scripts
If the main content appears only after JavaScript runs, some crawlers will not see it.
Treat that as a rule of thumb: assistants do sometimes quote pages from beyond the first page.
Schema markup today
Schema.org markup tells search engines what kind of page they are looking at: a company, a service, an article, a breadcrumb trail. Keep it accurate and in line with what visitors read.
Do not count on extra visual snippets for every markup type. On August 8, 2023, Google announced that FAQ rich results would be limited to well-known, authoritative government and health sites, and from September 13, 2023 HowTo rich results stopped appearing on desktop too. A plain question with a clear reply on the page still helps; the decorative snippet is gone for most sites. Source: Google Search Central, August 8, 2023.
Is it working?
- Search Console
Watch question-type queries and see whether impressions and clicks rise for the pages you changed.
- AI Overviews
Search your key questions on a fixed schedule and note whether your page is among the linked sources.
- Assistants
Put the same questions to ChatGPT and Perplexity several times and record whether your page is linked.
Read more
Replies vary, so one try is not enough.
On our own website, AI Overviews began linking to pages we had rewritten at one of the following weekly checks, and one of those links had vanished a week later. It is a small sample from one market (desktop results) without a control group; the numbers are in our GEO guide.
Questions people ask
Is AEO just about voice search?
No. It now covers every product that replies with the answer itself: featured snippets, AI Overviews, voice assistants and chat assistants.
Does every page need an FAQ block?
Only when the questions are ones customers really ask and the replies help them. An FAQ added just for markup no longer earns a rich result on most sites, and padding questions weaken the page.
How long should the answer be?
Long enough to stand on its own, usually two or three sentences, with details below for readers who want them. No word count guarantees a snippet.
Will AEO cost me visits?
If the engine gives the full answer, some people will not click through. In return your brand appears as the source. When people need more than a few lines, for example to compare options or check prices, a good reply often brings the visit anyway, although we have no data for your market.
Who can help with AEO?
You can go through the checklist yourself, a page at a time. If you want it done across the whole site with monthly tracking in AI replies, see our AI search optimization service. Agencies can order the same work under their own brand through our white label offer.
