AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) are the practices of making a website's content extractable and citable by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews — a distinct goal from traditional SEO, and one most business websites haven't addressed at all yet.
Why this is different from traditional SEO
Traditional SEO optimises for a ranked list of blue links a person scans and clicks. AEO/GEO optimises for an AI system extracting a direct, self-contained answer and citing (or not citing) your site as the source — the target output is different, so the content structure needs to be too.
What actually helps
- Self-contained answer blocks: a clear question followed by a direct 40-60 word answer that makes sense read entirely on its own, without the surrounding page context.
- FAQPage structured data: explicit markup that tells AI systems exactly which text on the page answers which question.
- An llms.txt file: a plain-text brief for AI assistants, an emerging standard that a growing number of AI crawlers read directly.
- Not blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt — a surprising number of sites accidentally block the exact bots that would otherwise cite them.
What doesn't help
Writing content specifically and only for AI systems, disconnected from what a human visitor would actually find useful, risks running into search engines' policies against low-value, purely AI-targeted content. The content still needs to genuinely serve a human reader first — the AEO structure is additive, not a replacement for real substance.
Why now
A meaningful and growing share of research and buying-decision queries now happen through AI assistants rather than a traditional search results page — a site invisible to that layer is invisible to an increasing share of its potential audience.