What is AEO and GEO? How to get recommended by ChatGPT and Google AI
Your customers are starting to ask an AI instead of scrolling a page of blue links. Here is how to make sure the answer they hear is your business.
For twenty years the goal was simple: rank on the first page of Google. That page is now shrinking. People ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, they read the AI summary at the top of Google, they let a voice assistant pick. The click is disappearing, and a new question takes its place: when someone asks an AI who to call, does it say your name?
Search is splitting into three
It helps to name the three games you are now playing at once.
- SEO (search engine optimization): ranking your pages in the classic list of results. Still real, still worth winning.
- AEO (answer engine optimization): becoming the concise answer that Google and assistants read aloud or show at the top. This is the featured snippet and the voice answer.
- GEO (generative engine optimization): becoming a source that generative tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews quote and recommend.
SEO is about pages. AEO and GEO are about answers and trust. The same site can win all three, but only if it is built for machines that read meaning, not just keywords.
Why this matters now, not next year
AI answers do not show ten options. They show one, or a short list. If you are not in it, you are invisible in a way that page two of Google never was, because the customer never sees a list to scroll. The businesses that get named early become the default, and defaults are hard to unseat.
How to get cited by an AI
Generative engines favour sources that are clear, structured and trustworthy. In practice that means:
- Answer real questions plainly. Write the question your customer asks, then answer it in the first two sentences. Assistants lift clean answers, not buried ones.
- Mark up your content. Structured data (schema) tells a machine what your page is: a service, a location, an FAQ, an article. It is the difference between text and understood text.
- Publish an llms.txt. A plain map of your site, written for language models, so they can find your services and facts without guessing.
- Be a clear entity. Consistent name, contact details and profiles across the web help an AI decide you are real and connect the dots to your business.
- Have substance to quote. Thin pages give an AI nothing to cite. Genuine, useful content is the raw material for a recommendation.
- Be fast and clean. A site that scores 100 and loads instantly is easier for every crawler, human or machine, to trust and read.
What we do about it
Every Trikrypt site is built for all three from day one. We structure answers into the page, add the schema that machines read, ship an llms.txt, and keep the site fast enough to score 100 on Google. You can see it on this very site: it carries the exact markup we are describing, and it is the reason an assistant can already summarise what we do.
If you are not sure whether an AI would recommend you today, that is worth finding out before a competitor becomes the default answer.
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