SEO vs GEO vs AEO: How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews

• SEO (search engine optimisation): earning a good position in traditional search results.
• AEO (answer engine optimisation): structuring content so it can be lifted as a direct answer, in featured snippets, voice answers and AI summaries.
• GEO (generative engine optimisation): making your content likely to be used and cited when generative tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews write an answer.

The labels are new and people use them loosely. In practice they are one job: be the clearest, most trustworthy source on a specific question.

Nobody outside these companies knows the exact mechanics, and anyone claiming a secret formula is guessing. What we can say from how these tools behave is that they tend to favour pages that are easy to parse, directly answer the question, come from a source that looks legitimate, and are available to crawl.

That points to a fairly boring, useful checklist.

Put a two or three sentence direct answer at the top of the page, then explain. This is the same structure you see at the top of this article. It helps readers who want the short version, and it gives a summariser a clean passage to quote.

Write headings as the questions people actually ask, and answer each in a tight paragraph before going deeper.

Schema markup tells machines what a page is. For a business site, the useful ones are Organization or LocalBusiness on the homepage, Article on blog posts, FAQPage where you have real questions and answers, and BreadcrumbList for structure. Keep the schema truthful and matched to visible content; do not mark up things a visitor cannot see.

• Check robots.txt. Blocking AI crawlers means you cannot be cited by them, so make that a deliberate choice.
• Publish an XML sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console.
• Make sure the important text is in the HTML itself, not hidden behind scripts that a crawler may not run.
• Consider a simple llms.txt file that points to your most useful pages. It is an emerging convention and not a ranking guarantee, but it costs almost nothing.

Answer engines lean on signs that a source is real: a named author, an about page, consistent business details (name, address, phone) across your site, Google Business Profile and directories, and mentions on other reputable sites. Original information helps too, such as your own case study numbers or a process you have actually used. Copying the same generic advice as everyone else gives a model no reason to pick you.

We will not promise you a spot in an AI answer. These systems change often, and citation is never guaranteed. What you control is the quality and clarity of your pages. If you also fix your site's speed and structure, which we covered in what we fixed on our own site, you are helping both readers and machines.