How people find companies when the answer arrives before the list of links.
This is where most of my writing sits. What changed in how search surfaces answers, how assistants decide which sources to quote, and the measurement that shows whether any of it is happening to you. If your rankings are steady and your traffic is not, start here.
Answer engine optimization services help your brand get found, understood, and cited by AI assistants. They split into two offers: diagnosis, which measures your AI visibility and tells you what to fix and in what order, and delivery, which does the technical and content work. Most should start with diagnosis: paying for delivery before you know the cause spends budget on the wrong layer.
A generative engine optimization checklist works best ordered by cause: the fixes are prerequisites for each other. Work in this order: make your content retrievable, make your identity consistent so a model knows who you are, make your key answers extractable, earn corroboration, and measure on a fixed schedule. Doing these out of order wastes effort on layers that cannot yet pay off.
GEO and SEO share most of their technical foundation, so you rarely need a separate agency or team for AI search. What you need is a provider who measures the right outcome and has reprioritised for it. Bring in a specialist only when your current provider cannot show a method for measuring AI visibility, or treats AI search as a product to upsell rather than a shift in the work they already do.
To check whether your brand appears in AI answers, run a fixed set of buyer questions through each assistant they use, in a clean session with personalisation off, and record whether you are cited, mentioned, or absent, and how you are described. Check each surface separately: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews retrieve and answer differently, and one does not predict another.
An AI visibility audit measures how AI assistants find, describe, and cite your brand, and diagnoses why. A thorough one checks four things: whether your pages can be retrieved and rendered, whether your identity is consistent enough to understand, whether your content is extractable, and how you are described and cited across the assistants buyers use. It is a diagnosis, not a score.
An assistant recommends the company it can most confidently connect to a category. A competitor gets named instead of you when the model has stronger evidence for them: they are retrieved more often, their pages answer the question directly, their identity is consistent, and other sources corroborate them. It is an evidence gap, not a quality gap, and each cause is diagnosable.
SEO is optimising to appear in search engine results. AEO, or answer engine optimisation, is optimising to be the source an AI-generated answer draws on. GEO, or generative engine optimisation, means substantially the same thing as AEO and the two are used interchangeably. In practice these are not three separate disciplines but one discipline with a broader definition of where visibility happens.
Check your robots.txt for directives targeting GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and similar agents. Blocking them keeps your content out of AI answers that would otherwise cite you. Some agents control training use and others live retrieval: blocking training does not affect whether you are cited today, while blocking retrieval removes you entirely.
AI assistants that browse the web run a search, retrieve candidate pages, extract passages that address the question, and compose an answer from those they judge most relevant and reliable. Being citable therefore depends on three things in sequence: being retrieved at all, containing a passage that directly answers the question, and carrying signals that the source is trustworthy.
Build a fixed set of prompts covering how people describe your category, your brand, and the topics you claim expertise in. Run each in a clean session with memory and personalisation off, several times, across the assistants your buyers use. Score every result as cited, mentioned, or absent, and record which competitors appeared instead. Repeat on a fixed schedule.
If your positions are steady but your clicks are falling, the likely cause is that AI-generated answers are satisfying searches that used to send you a visit. The query still happens, your page still ranks, but the click never occurs. This is measurable in Search Console: find pages where impressions hold or rise while clicks fall, showing as a falling click-through rate at a stable position.
A migration protects search rankings through redirects, but redirects do not transfer citations in AI answers. Assistants cite URLs they have seen, and third-party pages still point at your old ones. Baseline your AI visibility before you migrate, keep every redirect a single hop to a page that answers the old page's question, and re-run the same prompts for 90 days after launch.