Search has split into two surfaces. Classic results still send most organic traffic, but a growing share of research now ends inside an AI assistant that answers the question and cites a handful of sources. Search engine optimisation (SEO) earns you the ranking; answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) earn you the citation.
The good news is that both reward the same fundamentals: pages that answer a specific question clearly and early, structured data that tells machines what the page is, fast and crawlable templates, and a visible, verifiable author. The articles in this category break those fundamentals into practical steps — what to put in the first 60 words, how to structure headings as questions, which schema types matter, and how to check whether AI crawlers can reach you at all.
Everything here is written for business owners and in-house marketers who want organic growth they can measure, not vanity rankings. Where a tactic is still experimental — llms.txt, for example — it is called out honestly.
SEO (search engine optimisation) helps your pages rank in Google's results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) helps your content get quoted inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. They share the same foundation — useful, crawlable, trustworthy content — but AEO puts extra weight on direct answers, clear structure, schema and consistent entity facts.
You get cited by AI assistants by making your pages easy to quote and your entity easy to verify: open each page with a 40 to 60 word direct answer, structure it with question-shaped headings and an FAQ block, mark up Person, Service and Article schema with consistent identifiers, allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt, and publish an llms.txt summarising who you are and what you offer.
SEO aims to rank a page in search results; AEO aims to have your content quoted as the answer by AI assistants and featured snippets.
Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making your brand and pages likely to be mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
It helps machines understand what a page is and who wrote it. It does not guarantee citations, but clear answers plus valid schema make a page easier to quote.
See how I deliver seo, aeo & geo as a service, or book a free growth audit.