Practice
AEO & GEO
Answer Engine Optimization and Generative Engine Optimization: getting selected, cited, and described accurately inside an AI-generated answer.
The mechanics are different from SEO, where marketers optimized to get ranked in a list of links. Now users bring prompts instead of keywords. Citations and sentiment instead of positions. A web-wide reputation matters more than your own pages. This is the working practice - what I measure, what I build, and what I change when the ground moves.
What this covers
- Measuring visibility, share of voice, citation rate, and factual accuracy across major AI assistants
- Building the site architecture, extractability, and entity signals that make a page citable
- Scoring pages before they publish, and tracking domain-level AI referral traffic after
- Revising the approach as engine behavior changes
The tools
Two open tools come out of this practice: an AI Visibility Scorecard measuring how a brand is represented across AI assistants, and a page-level scoring rubric applied before publication.
Further Reading
Common Questions
- What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
- They describe the same category. AEO frames the goal as winning the answer an engine gives; GEO frames it as appearing inside generated output. The tactics are the same.
- How is this different from SEO?
- SEO optimizes for ranking in a list of links. AEO optimizes for being selected, cited, and described accurately inside a synthesized answer. Strong SEO still helps, because engines run searches to build answers, but the measurement changes: prompts rather than keywords, citation share rather than position.
- How do you measure AI search visibility?
- Across six metrics: recommendation rate, or how often the brand is actively recommended rather than merely listed; mention rate, or how often it is named at all; share of voice against competitors; citation rate, or how often the brand's site is cited as a source; accuracy of the factual claims made about it; and average position when it appears among options.
- What actually moves AI visibility?
- Most of it sits off your own site. Architecture and extractability set the floor; entity credibility and off-site signals do the rest.