AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are emerging disciplines for getting your content cited by AI-powered search surfaces like Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. According to Google's own AI optimization guide, these are extensions of traditional SEO rather than separate disciplines. Key practices include: ensuring pages are crawlable and indexed by AI search bots (distinguishing training crawlers like GPTBot from search indexers like OAI-SearchBot), creating content with specific data points and firsthand details that models can't synthesize from training data alone, using semantic HTML with clear structure, optimizing Core Web Vitals, applying structured data schemas where they power rich results, and making sites accessible to autonomous AI agents. Measurement relies on Google Search Console filtering for conversational queries, plus manually testing whether AI surfaces cite your domain.
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Eligibility comes before everything elseWhat gets cited is what a model can’t write from training data aloneClean technical structure helps the crawler and the modelVisuals, schema, and commerce data are the structured pipelinesAgentic experiences are the next surfaceMeasure what you can, and don’t chase what you can’tSort: