Guide · AnswerPulse

GEO and AEO: how to become the answer AI gives

By the Pulse Suite team · November 1, 2026

When people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Gemini which business to choose, the answer names a few and links a few sites. Generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) are the work of being one of them. This guide explains what they are, how AI assistants pick what to say, and what to do, in order.

SEO, AEO and GEO in one minute

SEO gets your pages into the list of links a search engine shows. AEO makes your content the direct answer: a featured snippet, a voice assistant's reply, and now a chatbot's. GEO gets your business named and cited in the answers that AI assistants write from several sources.

AEO and GEO overlap almost entirely: both are about being chosen as the answer. GEO adds one thing that matters a lot. An assistant searches the web, reads several sources and writes its own answer, so what other sites say about you counts as much as what your own site says.

How AI assistants decide what to say

There are two ways an assistant knows about you, and they call for different work.

• It searches the web while answering. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude turn the question into one or more web searches, read the pages they find and write an answer that cites some of them. The searches are often more specific than the question: a city, a service, "reviews", "prices". To be in these answers, your pages, and the pages that mention you, have to be found for those searches and easy to quote.
• It answers from what it learned. Without searching, a model answers from what the web said about you when it was trained, months earlier. Here what counts is how consistently and how often you are described across the web: your site, directories, press, Wikipedia, partners.

In both cases an assistant can only use what its crawlers can read, and it repeats what it reads, mistakes included.

What the research says

The term GEO comes from a 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, presented at the KDD conference in 2024. They tested how rewriting web pages changes how visible they are in the answers of generative search engines. Adding sources, quotations and statistics made pages up to 40% more visible in their tests, while stuffing pages with keywords did little, and the effect varied from one field to another. The lesson holds beyond the study: assistants favour content that gives them something precise and trustworthy to repeat.

A checklist, in order

1. Let the AI crawlers in. Your robots.txt should allow OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT), PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot: they are the ones that find pages to cite. Then check your firewall: services such as Cloudflare block AI crawlers on many sites by default, whatever robots.txt says.
2. Make the text readable without JavaScript. Crawlers read the HTML. A page whose text appears only after scripts run may look empty to them.
3. Answer in the first lines. One clear page per service or common question, with the answer up front: what you do, for whom, where, how much, how it works. Details and stories after.
4. State the facts the same way everywhere. Name, location, year founded, services, prices, contacts: on your site, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and the directories of your sector. Assistants that read contradicting facts repeat the wrong ones.
5. Give them something to quote. Figures from your work, named sources, quotes from customers, case studies with results. These are what the research found assistants pick up.
6. Add structured data. schema.org markup for your organization or local business, your services or products, and your questions and answers, so machines read the facts without guessing.
7. Be where the assistants look. The directories and review sites of your field, the trade and local press, comparison pages, and the discussions where people ask for recommendations, such as Reddit and forums: as yourself, helpfully, without advertising.
8. Keep it current. Dates, prices and team pages that are out of date make an assistant less sure of you, and sometimes wrong.

How to measure it

Single answers vary from one time to the next, so measure the average over many, the same way every week.

• Choose the questions your customers ask, mostly without your name: "the best X in your city", "who can help with Y". Questions that already name you show how you are described, not whether you are recommended.
• Ask each assistant every week, from your customers' country and in their language.
• Count how often you are named, in which position among the businesses listed, whether your site is linked, and how the answers describe you.
• Look at what is behind the answers: the sites they cite and the searches they ran. That is where to be present.
• Note what you change, and compare the weeks before and after.

Questions