AEO and GEO: how to become the answer AI assistants quote

A growing share of B2B research starts with a direct question to an assistant: 'which CRM for a 40-person sales team', 'how much does HubSpot implementation cost'. If your brand is not in the answer, you are invisible at the exact moment of consideration.

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO) are the work of making your content clear, structured and verifiable enough to be cited. They overlap with classic SEO, but the emphasis is different.

How answer engines decide

Search engines built their ranking on links and relevance signals accumulated over decades. Answer engines have to work with much less history, so they lean harder on things they can verify quickly.

• Structure. A page that answers a question in a clean heading and a short paragraph is easier to quote than one that buries the answer in prose.
• Entity clarity. Consistent naming for your company, products and people helps an assistant know who you are and what you offer.
• Verifiable facts. Numbers, definitions and named sources are easier to trust than adjectives. Vague claims rarely get cited.
• Consistency across the web. Your site, profiles and listings agreeing about what you do builds confidence in the entity.
• Signals that already work. Classic trust signals still matter. Behaving badly on the open web does not disappear because someone asked an assistant.

The pages that should earn citations

Not every page deserves an assistant's attention. Focus on the handful where being cited actually matters: the pages answering questions your buyers ask before purchase.

A clean FAQ that answers one question per item. A definition or comparison page that states a position plainly. A data point or survey your team genuinely produced. And an honest overview page describing what you do in language an LLM can lift without mangling.

A practical checklist

• Put one clear question per heading, and answer it directly underneath.
• Keep key definitions in 40–80 words, not inside a paragraph that meanders.
• Add structured data: Organization, Service and FAQ schema where they apply.
• Publish at least one original, named fact or figure a year that others can reference.
• Make sure your name, tagline and offering are written identically everywhere.

What we do not know yet

An honest caveat: the tooling for AEO and GEO is still young. Nobody can reliably rank 'citations in ChatGPT' the way they can rank in Google, and platform behaviour changes quickly.

That is not a reason to ignore it. It is a reason to treat it as an experiment with clear tests, and to run it alongside the SEO work that still pays the bills.

Buyers are asking assistants now, whether or not your brand is part of the answer. The question is only whether the answer mentions you.