What Is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization, AEO and SEO Explained

SEO, AEO and GEO in one minute

People now find businesses in three different ways, and each has its own name:

• SEO (search engine optimization) is about ranking your pages in Google and Bing results.
• AEO (answer engine optimization) is about being the direct answer: the featured snippet, the "People also ask" box, the voice assistant reply.
• GEO (generative engine optimization) is about being included in answers that AI assistants write, such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

You do not need three separate strategies. They share one foundation, and most of the work is making your site clear to machines and useful to people.

How do AI assistants decide what to mention?

Nobody outside the AI companies knows the exact formula, but the patterns are consistent. Assistants tend to cite pages that:

1. Answer the question directly, near the top of the page, in plain language.
2. Are easy to read for a machine, with clean headings, lists and structured data (JSON-LD).
3. State facts consistently across your site, your Google Business Profile and your social profiles: name, services, location, contact details.
4. Load fast and are crawlable, with server-rendered HTML rather than a blank page that needs JavaScript to appear.
5. Come from a source that looks trustworthy: real authors, real projects, real reviews, and other sites that mention you.

The practical checklist

1. Make sure crawlers can read your pages

Single-page apps that render only in the browser can look empty to many crawlers. Pre-render or server-render your pages so the full text is in the HTML. All Farwings sites are built this way.

2. Write answer-first content

Start each page or article with a two or three sentence answer, then expand. Use question-style headings such as "How much does it cost?" or "How long does it take?" because that is how people and assistants ask.

3. Add structured data

Use JSON-LD for your Organization, your Services, your Articles and a FAQPage on pages that really contain questions and answers. Structured data removes guesswork about what a page is.

4. Publish robots.txt, a sitemap and llms.txt

• robots.txt should not accidentally block search and AI crawlers you want, such as Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
• sitemap.xml lists every page and when it last changed.
• llms.txt is a short markdown file at the root of your site that summarises your business and links to your key pages for AI tools.

5. Keep your facts consistent

If your website says you are in Ahmedabad but an old directory says another city, assistants may repeat either. Audit your name, address, phone number and service list everywhere.

6. Earn mentions elsewhere

Case studies, client reviews, guest articles, directory listings and social profiles all help assistants confirm that you are a real, active business.

What not to do

Do not stuff pages with keywords, publish thin AI-generated articles in bulk, or invent statistics. Search engines and AI assistants both reward accuracy, and low-quality pages can hurt trust in your whole domain.

Where to start

If you only have an afternoon: fix your page titles and descriptions, add an answer-first summary to your top five pages, add FAQ sections where you genuinely get those questions, and publish a sitemap and llms.txt. If you would like help, our custom web development service builds all of this in from day one, or you can contact us for an SEO review of your current site.