AEO and GEO: how to get your content cited by AI assistants

Search is no longer only ten blue links. A growing share of discovery happens inside AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) are about making your content easy for those systems to understand, trust and cite.

What AI assistants look for

AI systems summarize. They prefer sources that state facts clearly, define terms, show who wrote the content and back claims with evidence. Content written for skimming humans and content written for summarizing machines turn out to have a lot in common.

Write answer-first sections

Open each section with a direct, one or two sentence answer to the question in the heading, then expand. This gives AI tools a clean passage to quote and gives human readers what they came for immediately.

Example

Instead of a heading like “Thoughts on budgets”, use “How much should a startup spend on content marketing?” and answer it in the first line.

Make authorship and expertise obvious

• Show a real author with a bio and links to their profiles.
• Publish an editorial policy that explains how content is researched and reviewed.
• Add Person, Article and FAQ structured data so machines can read the context.

Structure pages for extraction

Use descriptive headings, short paragraphs, lists for steps and tables for comparisons. A page that is easy to scan is also easy to extract. Avoid hiding key information inside images or tabs that do not render without scripts.

Publish an llms.txt file

An llms.txt file is a plain-language summary of your site for AI systems, listing your most important pages with a one-line description of each. It is quick to create and gives assistants a clean map of what you offer.

Keep traditional SEO strong

AEO and GEO build on SEO; they do not replace it. Crawlable pages, fast load times, internal links and helpful content still decide whether you are found at all. Most AI search tools pull from traditional search indexes first.

How to measure it

Track referral traffic from AI assistants in your analytics, test your brand and key questions in the major assistants each month, and note when your pages are cited. It is early, but the trend is clear enough to act on now.