AEO and GEO: how to get recommended by AI assistants
When a customer asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity who to hire, the assistant names a few businesses. AEO and GEO are the names for the work that gets your business onto that list.
What AEO and GEO mean
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) prepares your content to be the direct answer in Google featured snippets, AI Overviews and voice assistants. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) works on getting generative AI tools such as ChatGPT to mention, cite and recommend you. Both build on classic SEO.
What a website needs
- AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, such as OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended
- Content that can be read without JavaScript
- Clear facts about the business, the same everywhere: name, address, phone, services, prices
- schema.org markup and an llms.txt file
- Questions and answers written the way customers ask them
- The site added to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
What happens outside the website
AI assistants also look at what other sources say about you: your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, reviews, directories and media. A good website helps, but these signals decide a lot of recommendations, especially for local businesses.
Our approach
We built Aysel, an AI SEO service for businesses in Sarajevo and across Bosnia and Herzegovina, to check exactly this. It gives any website a free score from more than 40 checks and explains what stops AI from recommending the business. Every website we build ships with these foundations in place.