AI GEO — formally Generative Engine Optimisation, and sometimes called Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) — is the work of making a brand readable, trustworthy and citable inside AI answers.
Traditional SEO still matters. It earns a place on a results page. AI GEO earns a place in the answer itself. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini or Claude who to trust, the engine names a few brands. Those names become the consideration set.
Why the discipline exists
Buyers now ask engines who to choose. The engine synthesises one answer from pages, entities and sources it already trusts. If your brand is missing, poorly structured, or contradicted by stronger sources, you are not “ranking lower” — you are absent from the shortlist.
That absence does not show up in Google Analytics as a lost click. The buyer never visited you.
What AI GEO actually changes
GEO work is not a new keyword list. It usually includes:
- Mapping the buyer questions engines already answer in your category
- Publishing definition-first pages that answer those questions in the first paragraph
- Adding machine-readable structure (FAQPage, Article, Organization, Person)
- Making the site crawlable to AI bots (robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt)
- Tracking, week by week, whether you are named, cited, or replaced
What it does not do
No honest firm can guarantee a citation. Engines decide. Paid placements do not exist inside ChatGPT or Claude answers. Invented statistics, fake case studies and “guaranteed visibility” offers are the opposite of GEO — they train engines and buyers to distrust you.
How to start
Start with a baseline: run your real buyer prompts across the five engines and record what they say. Then close the gaps — content, entities, schema, sources — and measure again. Optimizer360.ai’s engagements begin with that audit; every finding is meant to be reproducible in the engine itself.
See also the executive briefing on AI GEO and how Optimizer360.ai compares to trackers.