Entity consistency
One description of your business, one name, one phone format, used identically on your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories, so AI systems recognise you as one entity.
Discover — be found
AEO and GEO: be the answer AI search gives
Many questions are now answered directly, by AI assistants, by AI answers at the top of search results and by voice search, without a click to a list of links. To be part of that answer, a business has to be easy for these systems to understand, consistent across the web, and the clearest source for the questions its buyers ask.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) are the work of making a business the source that AI assistants and answer engines cite when they answer a question, through clear and extractable content, structured data and a consistent identity across the web.
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
AEO focuses on answer engines that return one direct answer, such as featured snippets, voice assistants and AI overviews in search. GEO focuses on generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini that write an answer from many sources. The work overlaps heavily: clear answers, structured data and a consistent, verifiable identity serve both.
What it includes
Six parts of AEO and GEO work
Question research
The questions your buyers ask search engines and AI assistants, and how those tools currently answer them.
Answer-first content
Question-shaped headings with a direct answer beneath, one-sentence definitions, comparison tables and specific facts: the formats answer engines extract.
Structured data
Organisation, service, FAQ, article and breadcrumb markup that labels what each page is and who stands behind it.
Crawler access
Deliberate decisions about which AI crawlers may read your site, set in robots.txt, and a plain-language llms.txt summary for machine readers.
Monitoring
Regular checks of how AI assistants describe and cite your business, and of featured answers in search, so changes are based on evidence.
Can you measure AEO and GEO results?
Only partly, and we say so. There is no reliable reporting yet for how often AI tools cite a business. We track what can be tracked, such as featured answers, visits referred by AI tools and how assistants describe you when asked, and we do not promise outcomes that nobody can currently measure.
Generative and answer engine optimisation: the future of search
Three kinds of search
How do SEO, AEO and GEO differ?
They reward different things. SEO rewards pages that rank in a list of results; AEO rewards the single clearest answer to a question; GEO rewards being a trusted, consistent source that a generative tool chooses to draw on. One well-structured site can serve all three.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where results appear | Search result listings | Featured answers, voice, AI overviews | Answers written by AI assistants |
| What it rewards | Relevance and authority | A clear, direct, extractable answer | Consistent, trusted, citable information |
| What we work on | Technical health, content, links | Question headings, definitions, FAQ markup | Entity consistency, specific facts, crawler access |
Questions
AEO & GEO: common questions
Does AEO replace SEO?
No. AEO and GEO build on SEO: AI tools still draw heavily on pages that search engines can crawl and trust. What changes is the emphasis, towards direct answers, structured data and a consistent identity, because the answer is increasingly shown without a click.
Why does a consistent description across the web matter?
AI systems decide what a business is by matching information from many sources. If your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn page and directory listings describe you differently, you look like several different businesses, and none of them is confidently cited. One consistent description lets the systems resolve you as one entity.
Should we let AI crawlers read our website?
If you want to be cited by AI assistants, generally yes: a tool cannot cite what it cannot read. The trade-off is that your content may also be used to train AI models. It is a business decision, and we set it explicitly in robots.txt rather than leaving it to defaults.
Do you apply this to your own website?
Yes. This site is built to the same rules we recommend: question-shaped headings with direct answers, structured data on every page, one consistent description of the business everywhere, and deliberate settings for AI crawlers.
Find out how AI assistants describe you
We start by asking the tools your buyers use what they know about you, and fixing what they get wrong.