A few years ago, being found online meant one thing: ranking on Google. Today, people also ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini for answers — and those tools reply with a summary, not a list of links. If your business is not part of that summary, you are invisible to those customers.
That is why you keep hearing two new terms: AEO and GEO. Here is what they mean and what to actually do about them.
The three terms in plain language
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps your pages rank in the traditional list of search results.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) helps your content get picked as the direct answer — in featured snippets, voice assistants and Google’s AI Overviews.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) helps AI chat tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention and cite your business when they write their reply.
The good news: these are not three separate jobs. AI tools rely on many of the same signals Google always has — clear content, a healthy website and a trustworthy brand. AEO and GEO sit on top of good SEO; they do not replace it.
How AI tools decide who to cite
When someone asks an AI tool a question, it quietly runs several small searches in the background, reads the pages it finds, and writes an answer from them. It prefers pages that are easy to crawl, answer the question directly, and come from a source it recognises. Your job is to make your website the easiest, clearest source it can be.
A simple six-step process
- 1. Let AI crawlers in. Check your robots.txt and firewall settings. Some hosting and CDN providers block AI bots by default — if they cannot read your site, nothing else matters.
- 2. Put your content on the page itself. Text that only loads through JavaScript is often invisible to AI. This is one of the most common issues we find in technical SEO audits of ecommerce stores.
- 3. Answer first, explain second. Start each page and FAQ with a short, direct answer, then add the details. AI tools lift the clearest paragraph, not the longest one.
- 4. Write the questions people actually ask. Build FAQ sections around real customer questions — “How long does delivery take?” “Is this suitable for X?” These match the way people talk to AI.
- 5. Add structured data. FAQ, Product, Organization, and Article schema tell machines exactly what your page is about and remove guesswork.
- 6. Be present on your website too. Keep your Google Business Profile complete, get listed in relevant directories, and earn mentions on trusted industry sites. AI tools cross-check what others say about you.
How to know it is working
Rankings alone will not show you this. Ask the main AI tools questions your customers would ask and note whether you appear. Watch for referral traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar sources in your analytics. Track it monthly, the same way you track keyword rankings.
Where to start
If this feels like a lot, start with steps one and two — they fix the problems that stop everything else from working. Bay20 includes an AI-readiness check in its digital marketing services, and our Magento SEO and SEO packages now cover AEO and GEO as standard. Get in touch if you would like a quick review of how your website looks to AI today.
Please contact us at wargis@bay20.com / manish@bay20.com or call us at +91-9582784309 or +91-8800519180 for any support related to Digital marketing/SEO.
