AEO & GEO: get your business cited where search is heading.

What are AEO and GEO?

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of optimising your content so it’s chosen as the direct answer to a question, in featured snippets, voice assistants, and increasingly in AI chat tools. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) goes a step further: it’s about making your brand visible and citable inside the answers that generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity write from scratch.

The shift matters because the destination of a search is changing. For years, ranking meant earning a click. Now a growing share of searches end with the answer delivered directly, no click required. If your business isn’t part of the source material these engines pull from, you simply won’t appear, no matter how well you rank in the traditional sense. AEO and GEO are how you stay visible as that shift accelerates.

Who needs AEO and GEO?

Becoming relevant to nearly everyone, urgent for some.

If your customers research before they buy, some part of that research is already happening inside an AI answer rather than on a results page. These are the cases where it is worth acting now rather than watching.

How I optimise for answer and generative engines

Five pieces of work, built on solid SEO rather than replacing it.

How AEO and GEO benefit your business

Most of the upside is not the AI traffic itself.

AEO vs GEO vs traditional SEO

Three terms used loosely, and the plain distinction between them.

These get thrown around interchangeably, usually by people selling one of them. Here is the difference that actually matters when you are deciding what to buy.

The crucial point is that these are not competing choices, they are layers. Strong traditional SEO is the foundation that makes AEO possible, and both feed the authority and clarity that GEO depends on. You do not abandon one for another. You extend your reach as the stack grows, and the work overlaps far more than the three separate acronyms suggest.

Who benefits most

Where the return arrives soonest.

AEO and GEO matter most for businesses whose customers research before they buy: considered purchases and services where being named as a trusted option inside an answer carries genuine weight, because the buyer is building a shortlist rather than clicking whatever appears first.

Brands already investing in content benefit fastest, because the raw material exists and the work is largely restructuring rather than starting again. Businesses watching click-through soften while impressions hold benefit by reclaiming visibility they have already earned and are quietly losing. And anyone wanting a first-mover edge benefits simply because establishing authority now costs a fraction of displacing an established source later.

This field moves quickly enough that who is watching it on your behalf matters as much as the method, so here is my background and how I keep current with it. If you are choosing between one person tracking this and an agency team, the freelance SEO consultant page is the comparison.

What the work has produced

Named clients, not anonymised screenshots.

Answer engines are new but the underlying work is not, so here are three engagements with the numbers attached and the clients named. Each one links to the full account of what was done.

AI visibility is harder to attribute than a ranking, so none of that is a forecast. It is evidence that the underlying work, structure and clarity and authority, is what both classic and answer engines reward.

What AEO and GEO cost

Published, because you should not have to book a call to find out.

Answer engine work is rarely bought on its own, because the things that earn a citation are largely the things that earn a ranking. It runs inside the same monthly retainer.

Link placements are priced separately and published on my link building page, because buying links and buying strategy are different purchases and folding them into one number hides what you are actually paying for. You approve every placement and its cost before anything is spent.

Three things move where you land in that range: how much of the work is diagnosis rather than ongoing execution, how contested your topic is, and how much your team can publish and update without me. I do not publish an hourly rate: quoting by the hour rewards slowness and pushes clients into rationing questions to save money, which is precisely the moment the work goes wrong. Before you commit I will tell you what I think the realistic timeline is and what the first quarter should produce, and if the number does not make sense against what your site could plausibly earn, I will say so.