There's a version of this article where I open with some stat about how AI is changing search. I'm not doing that.
Instead: a few months ago, someone asked ChatGPT to recommend a content strategist for wellness brands. ChatGPT gave them three names. None of them were particularly famous. None of them had the most followers. But all three had one thing in common: their websites were written in a way that AI could actually read, understand, and cite with confidence.
The person who asked? They hired one of those three. The content strategist with better work, more experience, and a nicer Instagram? Invisible. Didn't come up once.
That's the thing that changed. And most people haven't clocked it yet. This is what GEO and AEO are about, and why they matter more than most small brand owners realise right now.
This Isn't About AI. It's About Who's in the Room.
For a long time, getting found online meant one thing: convincing Google's crawler your page was worth showing to humans. You wrote content, you used the right words, you got other sites to link to you, and if you did it well enough and waited long enough, Google put you on page one.
That system still exists. It still matters. I'm not here to tell you SEO is dead because it isn't.
But a new reader showed up. Several, actually.
ChatGPT. Perplexity. Google's AI Overviews. Gemini. Claude. When someone types a question into any of these, they don't get ten blue links. They get an answer, assembled, synthesised, and delivered in one go. And that answer came from somewhere. It came from websites, articles, and pages that these AI systems read, understood, and decided were worth pulling from.
The question is whether your site is one of them.
Two Terms You'll Hear a Lot (and What They Actually Mean)
AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation.
This is about structuring your content so search engines can pull a direct answer from it. You know when you Google something and the answer appears at the top of the page before any links? That's a featured snippet. Someone wrote that. Their page was structured clearly enough, specifically enough, that Google extracted it and put it front and centre.
AEO is the practice of writing so that happens to you on purpose.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation.
This is newer and a bit more abstract. It's about being cited, paraphrased, or recommended by AI systems when they generate responses. It's not just "does Google rank me". It's "when someone asks an AI about my topic, does my content show up in what gets said back?"
They're related. They're not the same.
AEO is Google extracting a line from your FAQ section. GEO is ChatGPT mentioning your methodology when someone asks how to approach content strategy for small businesses. Both matter. Both require you to write differently than you probably are right now.
How AI Actually Reads Your Site
I find this part genuinely interesting, so bear with me.
When an AI system like ChatGPT generates a response to a question, it doesn't just know things from training. For real-time or specific queries, it retrieves content from the web and synthesises it. The process is called RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation, if you want to sound like you know things at dinner parties). 😂
Here's the part that changes how you should think about your writing: AI doesn't read pages the way a human does. It reads in passages. In chunks. It extracts specific paragraphs that are independently useful, meaning a paragraph that makes complete sense without the ones around it.
If your writing is structured as one long flowing argument that only makes sense start to finish, AI will struggle to extract anything clean from it. If each section stands on its own and frontloads the main point in the first sentence, it becomes citable.
"Citable" is the word I'd keep in your head. Write like someone might quote you. Because increasingly, something is.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Three things that actually move the needle, in order of how much they matter:
1. Answer questions directly and immediately.
If your page is about content strategy for educators, there should be a section (with a clear heading) that directly answers "what is a content strategy for educators?" in two or three sentences before expanding. Not buried in paragraph four. Not after a long preamble about your philosophy. At the top of that section, in the first two sentences.
This is how AEO works. The question is the heading. The direct answer is the first sentence. Then you expand.
2. Write citable chunks.
Each paragraph should be able to exist alone. No vague pronouns ("this approach", "the above method") that require context from the paragraph before. If someone lifted your paragraph out of the page entirely, would it still make sense? If yes, it's a citable chunk. If no, it depends too much on what's around it to be useful to an AI pulling fragments.
Concrete and specific beats vague and general, every time. Not "I help clients develop strategies" but "I build 90-day content systems for wellness coaches who are posting inconsistently and want a structure that doesn't require daily content creation." That second one is extractable. The first one is wallpaper.
3. Structure for humans and machines simultaneously.
Use real headings. Answer real questions. Have a FAQ section. Genuinely, FAQ sections are citation magnets because the format (question, direct answer, expansion) is exactly what AI is looking for. If you have FAQ schema implemented in your site's code, even better. Pages with FAQ schema are significantly more likely to appear in AI Overviews.
You don't have to choose between writing for people and writing for AI. The things that make content readable and useful for a human, clarity, structure, specificity, directness, are exactly what AI retrieves.
Why This Especially Matters If You're a Coach, Educator, or Solo Founder
I work with a lot of people who built their reputations through referrals, word of mouth, and showing up consistently. That still works. It will keep working.
But here's what I keep seeing: the AI economy runs on being findable in a very specific way. When someone who doesn't already know you exists asks an AI for help, they get whoever the AI has information about. Not whoever is best. Whoever is legible.
If your website is a portfolio that assumes the reader already knows what you do, it won't get cited. If your site has no text, just images and a contact form, it won't get cited. If your blog is full of general encouragement and vibe-based content with no specific claims, frameworks, or directly answerable questions, it won't get cited.
This isn't about gaming anything. It's about communicating clearly enough that a system built to retrieve and synthesise information can actually do that with your work.
Your ideas are good. Your approach is specific. The question is whether you've written it down in a way that proves that to something that's never met you.
This Is Still Early
I want to be honest about something. GEO is measurable but it's not fully mapped yet. The signals are becoming clearer. The data is pointing in consistent directions. But nobody has it completely figured out, including the people building these systems.
What we do know: specificity gets cited. Structure gets extracted. Authority signals matter. Named authorship matters. Fresh content matters. Directness matters.
None of that is new advice, which is maybe the most useful thing I can say. Good writing has always been specific, structured, and direct. The difference is that now, something is reading it before your potential client does.
Write for that too.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)? GEO is the practice of optimising your content to be cited, paraphrased, or recommended by AI systems like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini. When someone asks an AI a question and the AI generates a response, it pulls from web content. GEO is about making your content the kind that gets pulled.
What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation)? AEO is the practice of structuring your content so search engines can extract a direct answer from it and display it as a featured snippet or in a People Also Ask box. The goal is to be the answer on the search results page, not just a link somewhere below it.
What's the difference between SEO, AEO, and GEO? SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is about ranking in traditional search results. AEO is about being extracted as a direct answer within those results. GEO is about being cited by AI systems that generate responses instead of showing links. All three matter and they overlap significantly. Content that's well-structured for AEO tends to perform better for GEO as well.
Does GEO replace SEO? No. Traditional SEO still drives significant traffic and matters for long-term visibility. GEO is an additional channel, not a replacement. The smartest approach right now is building content that works across all three: traditional search, featured snippets, and AI citation.
How do I know if my content is being cited by AI? This is still an emerging space and tracking is limited compared to traditional SEO. Tools like Perplexity and SearchGPT can be tested manually by searching your topic and seeing what comes up. More structured AI visibility tracking tools are developing. For now, the best approach is building content that meets the known citation signals: specificity, clear structure, direct answers, and named authorship.
What kind of content gets cited by AI? AI systems tend to cite content that is specific rather than vague, structured with clear headings and direct answers, written by a named author with stated expertise, and regularly updated. Listicle formats, FAQ sections, and content with concrete examples or frameworks perform disproportionately well in AI-generated responses.
If you need help building content that actually meets those signals, that's what content & copywriting support is for.
