What is AI SEO?
AI SEO is the technical and editorial work that makes a website eligible to be quoted by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It is also called answer engine optimisation (AEO) or generative engine optimisation (GEO); the three names describe the same work.
It covers letting AI crawlers reach the site, serving content in the HTML, marking the business up as a structured entity, and writing passages that make sense when quoted on their own.
What AI SEO is
AI assistants answer questions by drawing on web pages, either retrieved when the question is asked or learned when the model was trained. Some of them name or link the pages they used. AI SEO is the work of making a website one of those sources.
It overlaps heavily with traditional SEO. A fast site that search engines can crawl, with accurate structured data, is easier for both a search engine and an AI assistant to read. What differs is how success is judged: traditional SEO looks at where a page ranks in a list of results, and AI SEO at whether the business is named or cited inside a generated answer.
How AI SEO differs from traditional SEO
| Dimension | Traditional SEO | AI SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Target | Position in a list of results | Being quoted or cited inside an AI answer |
| Unit of content | The page | A passage that makes sense on its own |
| Structured data focus | Page and breadcrumb markup | Organization, Service and FAQPage markup that identify the business |
| Measurement | Rankings and clicks | Mentions and citations for priority questions |
What the work involves
- Crawler access. Decide separately whether AI systems may use the site for answering questions and for model training, and set the robots.txt directives to match.
- Content in the HTML. Serve the page content in the server's response, so a crawler that does not run JavaScript still sees it.
- Entity markup. Mark the business up with Organization and Service structured data under one consistent identifier, and keep the name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear.
- Quotable passages. Write answers that name their subject and make sense without the paragraph above them.
Many sites also publish an llms.txt file, a plain summary of the business with links to its key pages. It is cheap to add, although there is little public evidence yet that assistants rely on it.
What is AEO?
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. An answer engine is a system that replies to a question with an answer instead of a list of links, which covers AI assistants and Google's AI Overviews. AEO is the name technical SEO practitioners most often use for the work described above.
In practice AEO concentrates on the page itself: a short, direct answer near the top, FAQ blocks with FAQPage markup, tables and numbered steps where the content suits them, and headings that say what each section answers.
What is GEO?
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, and you will also see it called GEO SEO. The term comes from the research paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal et al. (arXiv 2311.09735), first posted in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024.
The paper describes generative engines as search systems that use large language models to gather sources and summarise them into one answer. Because those systems run on large language models, the same work is sometimes called LLM SEO. It proposes GEO as a framework to help content creators improve how visible their content is in those answers, and introduces GEO-bench, a benchmark of user queries across several domains. It reports that GEO can boost visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%, and that how well the methods work varies by domain.
Outside the paper, GEO is used interchangeably with AEO and AI SEO.
How to tell whether it is working
There is no ranking report for AI answers. The practical measure is to put your priority questions to the main assistants at regular intervals and record whether the business is named or linked, alongside the search data in Google Search Console. Answers differ between assistants and change over time, so one check on its own is not a reliable measure.
How GetQuickSites approaches AI SEO
We treat AI SEO as engineering work on the site itself: crawler directives, server-rendered content, structured data and page copy. We do it on sites we build and on sites we did not build. We work in four steps: record which businesses AI assistants name for your customers' questions, check how they read your site, compare the pages they cite, and build what the site is missing. The AI SEO services page describes what is included, and our guide to how SEO and AI SEO work is priced explains retainers, project prices and hourly rates.
Frequently asked questions
What is AI SEO?+
AI SEO is the work that makes a website eligible to be quoted by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. It covers crawler access, serving content in the HTML, marking the business up as a structured entity, and writing passages that make sense when quoted on their own.
Are AI SEO, AEO and GEO different things?+
They describe the same work. AEO (answer engine optimisation) is the term most used by technical SEO practitioners. GEO (generative engine optimisation), sometimes written GEO SEO, comes from the 2023 research paper of the same name. LLM SEO is another name used for the same work. AI SEO is the plain-language name for all of them.
What did the GEO research paper find?+
The paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal et al. (arXiv 2311.09735, accepted to KDD 2024), introduces GEO as a framework for improving how visible content is in generative engine responses, and a benchmark called GEO-bench. It reports that GEO can boost visibility in those responses by up to 40%, and that how well the methods work varies by domain.
Does AI SEO replace traditional SEO?+
No. Much of the work overlaps: a fast, crawlable site with accurate structured data helps with both. AI SEO adds attention to how individual passages read when an assistant quotes them without the rest of the page.
What is llms.txt and do I need one?+
llms.txt is a Markdown file at the root of a website that summarises the business and links to its key pages. It is cheap to publish. There is little public evidence so far that AI assistants rely on it, so treat it as a small addition to the work described on this page.
How long does AI SEO take?+
It varies, and we do not promise a timeframe. Assistants that search the web when a question is asked can pick up changes once pages are recrawled. What a model learned during training changes only when the model is updated.
How much does AI SEO cost?+
It is scoped and quoted per project after we have looked at the site. We do not publish prices.
Does GetQuickSites offer AI SEO?+
Yes. We do AI SEO as engineering work on sites we build and on sites we did not build. The AI SEO service page describes what is included.