Why it matters now
Answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews write one answer and name a few businesses in it. When a customer asks who to buy from, there is no second page of results: being one of the few names in the answer, or missing from it, decides whether that customer hears about you at all.
How answer engines decide what to say
They build each answer from pages they can read and sources they trust. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: to be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet, and no special markup or AI text file is needed.
Other engines document less, but the pattern is the same everywhere: a clear, crawlable page that states a fact plainly is easier to quote than one that hides it, and a business that many trusted sources describe the same way is easier to name with confidence.
What AEO work involves
Let AI crawlers read your site: check that your robots.txt does not block them. Answer the questions your customers ask in the first sentence of the page that answers them. State your facts, such as prices, locations, opening hours and who you serve, in text rather than images. Add structured data that matches what the page shows.
Keep your name, address, phone number and profiles identical everywhere, and link your official profiles from your structured data. Be present on the directories, review sites and publications that engines already cite for your category. An llms.txt file is optional: cheap to publish, but no major engine has said it uses one.
AEO, GEO and SEO
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton University, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, later published at KDD 2024; AEO comes from the idea of answer engines. In everyday use the two mean much the same thing.
Google’s own guide calls AEO and GEO terms for work “specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences” and adds that, from Google Search’s perspective, optimising for generative AI search is still SEO. Much of the work overlaps: a crawlable, clear, trustworthy page helps in both places.
How to measure it
Ask the engines your customers’ questions on a schedule (prompt tracking), and record whether you are named, how early, next to which competitors (share of voice) and which sources are cited. Many tools then summarise those readings as an AI visibility score. One answer is a snapshot; the trend over weeks is what tells you whether your work is paying off.
How AEOHIT helps
AEOHIT asks seven AI engines the questions your customers ask, records whether and where you are named, writes the fixes for the gaps, and re-measures after you publish them. Nobody can guarantee a placement; the aim is to measure honestly and improve the odds.
Sources
- Google Search Central: AI optimization guide (last updated 10 July 2026)
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website (last updated 10 December 2025)
- GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735, 2023; KDD 2024)
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