Short answer: Answer engines cite pages that state a claim plainly, back it with specifics, and are easy to parse without running JavaScript. In practice that means server-rendered HTML, a direct answer in the first paragraph under each heading, real structured data, consistent naming of your business across the web, and facts that carry dates and sources.
What are GEO and AEO?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content likely to be used and cited inside AI-generated answers. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the narrower job of making individual questions answerable directly from your page. Both sit on top of ordinary SEO rather than replacing it: a page that cannot be crawled or does not deserve to rank will not be cited either.
How is this different from classic SEO?
Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of ten links. Answer engines compress the list into a paragraph and attribute a handful of sources. So the unit of success changes from "we rank third" to "we are the sentence the model quotes". That rewards writing that is extractable — short, self-contained, specific — over writing that builds slowly toward a point.
What actually makes a page quotable?
- Answer first, elaborate second. Put a two-to-three sentence answer directly under the heading that asks the question. Models lift contiguous text; make the liftable part correct on its own.
- Server-render your content. Several AI crawlers, including OpenAI's GPTBot, do not execute JavaScript. Content that only appears after client-side rendering may simply not exist to them.
- Be specific. Numbers, dates, versions and named tools survive summarisation. Adjectives do not.
- Structure the page. Descriptive headings, short paragraphs, lists and tables all map cleanly onto the chunks retrieval systems work with.
- Cite your own sources. Linking to primary documentation makes a page look like a reliable node rather than an orphan claim.
Does structured data still matter?
Yes, but be honest about which part. Google restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites back in August 2023, so FAQPage markup will not win you an expandable snippet any more. It remains worth adding because it hands machines an unambiguous list of questions and answers, and because Organization, Article and BreadcrumbList markup is what lets a search engine resolve your pages into a coherent entity. This site emits all of those, plus a sameAs list pointing at our verified profiles.
Which AI crawlers should you know about?
These are the user agents that show up in logs, and each is controlled through robots.txt:
- GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot — OpenAI's training and search crawlers.
- ClaudeBot — Anthropic's crawler.
- PerplexityBot — Perplexity's index.
- Google-Extended — controls whether your content can be used for Gemini grounding and training. Blocking it does not affect your Google Search ranking, but it does remove you from those answers.
Decide deliberately. Blocking every AI crawler protects content from training use and also guarantees you are never cited.
What about llms.txt?
The llms.txt convention proposes a Markdown file at your domain root summarising your site for language models. It is a community proposal, not a standard, and no major engine has confirmed that it reads one. We publish one because it costs nothing and is trivially easy to keep current — but treat claims that it drives AI visibility with suspicion until an engine says otherwise.
How do you measure any of this?
There is no Search Console for answer engines yet. What you can do: track referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and copilot.microsoft.com in your analytics, watch for AI crawler user agents in server logs, and periodically ask the major assistants the questions your customers ask, recording whether you appear. It is manual and imperfect. Anyone selling you a precise "GEO score" is selling you a guess.
If you want your existing pages restructured for this, that is part of what our SEO and marketing practice does.