GEO and AI SEO: how to get cited in AI answers

What is the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) is about being found in the search results of Google and Bing: rankings, clicks and visitors.

GEO (generative engine optimization) is about being mentioned or cited in answers generated by an AI model, such as ChatGPT with web search, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews and AI Mode.

AEO (answer engine optimization) is about providing the direct answer to a specific question, so an answer engine can reuse that answer and cite you as the source.

In practice, the three overlap: the same page must be easy to index, provide a clear answer and offer context through structured data. If you focus only on rankings, you cannot see whether AI assistants use the site. If you focus only on AI, you miss the foundation those assistants use to find their sources.

How do AI assistants choose their sources?

An AI assistant does not invent its sources: for a question involving current or local information, it finds pages through a search index or its own crawler and uses them to build the answer. ChatGPT uses external search providers and its own search bot for this, Perplexity its own search bot and index, and Gemini Google Search. OpenAI and Perplexity do not publish how they then choose between pages; Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode rest on the same ranking as Google Search. Three things are in your own hands:

Access

if an AI search bot is blocked in robots.txt, that assistant cannot read the page and therefore cannot cite it. Content Signals in robots.txt also let you state what your content may be used for, although not every AI company has committed to following them.

Answer

pages that answer the question directly in the first paragraph, with facts and sources, clear headings and an FAQ, are easier to reuse than pages where the answer is hidden. Google says you don't need to write in a specific way for its generative AI features; Microsoft recommends short answers of one or two sentences, self-contained sentences, lists and tables for AI answers in Bing and Copilot.

Context

an Organization schema and hreflang on multilingual sites help search engines understand who you are and which language version suits which visitor. An llms.txt and FAQ schema are optional: Google Search does not use llms.txt and has not shown FAQ results since May 2026.

AI readiness checklist: the seven checks Vibeking runs

With every scan, Vibeking runs the same seven checks; for four of them (AI search bots, llms.txt, Organization schema and hreflang), a missing item becomes a fix task with an explanation, and a missing H1 appears as a regular SEO task:

1. 1.robots.txt does not block the search bots of AI assistants (OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User, PerplexityBot) or Google-Extended. You may block training bots such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot.
2. 2.There is an llms.txt with working links to the most important pages. Optional: Google Search does not use the file.
3. 3.The homepage has an Organization schema (name, logo, address, contact).
4. 4.Your indexable pages may show a snippet: no nosnippet and no max-snippet:0. Google only shows a page as a link in AI Overviews and AI Mode when it is indexed and may be shown with a snippet.
5. 5.Multilingual sites use hreflang for every language version.
6. 6.The H1 and the text of your pages are in the HTML itself, not added only after JavaScript runs. According to measurements by Vercel, the crawlers of ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, among others, do not run JavaScript.
7. 7.The first paragraph below the H1 answers the page's question in no more than 400 characters.

The standard SEO checks run alongside these: titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, sitemap, internal links, images without alt text and server response time.

How Vibeking measures AI visibility

For each site, we compile a list of questions your customers ask an AI assistant, such as which provider is the best fit in a region. Every week we ask those questions to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode and record which domains are cited in the answer. Every day we check per keyword whether Google shows an AI Overview and who is cited in it. This produces a score for each assistant: the share of questions in which your site is cited, plus an overview of the competitors that are cited.

If a competitor is cited and you are not, Vibeking creates a task "Answer block for: [the question]" with a fix plan: a short, direct answer of one or two sentences with facts at the top of the most relevant page, access for the AI search bots and mentions on the sources the assistant cites now; an FAQ item and a line in llms.txt are optional. You implement the fix yourself or let Vibeking do it. After seven days, we check every place we measure to see whether you are now cited, including the Google AI Overview when the question belongs to a tracked keyword; for a completed fix order, you only pay once you are cited on at least one place where you were not before.

What you can do today

• Answer each important question at the top of the page about it in one or two sentences, with concrete facts.
• Place an Organization schema on your homepage and answer frequently asked questions on the page itself.
• Check robots.txt: allow OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot; you may block training bots such as GPTBot. An llms.txt is optional.
• Keep the basics in order: unique titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, a sitemap and a fast server response.
• Measure it: start with a free baseline scan and then track weekly whether AI assistants cite you.