What are AEO and GEO?
AEO (answer engine optimization) makes a page easy to use as a direct answer in featured snippets, voice assistants and AI answers. GEO (generative engine optimization) makes it likely to be cited by generative search such as AI chat assistants and AI overviews. Both reward clear answers, good structure, crawlable pages and trustworthy, well sourced content.
How is AEO different from SEO?
Classic SEO aims for a blue link that people click. AEO aims to be the answer itself: the featured snippet, the spoken answer, the paragraph an assistant reads out. The page still needs to rank, but the winning passage is short, direct and easy to lift.
In practice AEO means answer-first writing. Put the question in a heading, answer it in the first one or two sentences, then add detail.
What does GEO add?
Generative search engines write their own answer and cite a few sources. To be one of those sources, a page needs to be easy for the engine to reach, understand and trust.
That means clear entities (who you are, what the product or place is), consistent facts across your site and profiles, structured data, real expertise and sources, and pages that work without running JavaScript, because many AI crawlers do not run it.
AEO and GEO checklist
- Use question-style headings that match how people ask, for example "How long does it take to ...?".
- Answer in the first 40 to 60 words under each heading, in a sentence that still makes sense on its own.
- Add a visible FAQ for real follow-up questions, and mark it up with FAQ structured data.
- Use lists, steps and tables for processes and comparisons. They are easy to extract.
- Add structured data for what the page is: Organization, Article, Product, LocalBusiness, HowTo and so on.
- Keep facts consistent: the same name, address, prices and descriptions everywhere.
- Show who wrote the page and when it was last updated.
- Cite sources and link to evidence. Generative engines prefer content that can be checked.
- Make sure the main content is in the HTML the server sends, not only drawn by JavaScript.
- Check robots.txt does not block the crawlers of the answer engines you want to appear in.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
llms.txt is a proposed plain text file at the root of a site that points language models to the most useful pages. It is still a proposal, not a standard that every engine reads, so treat it as a small extra, never a replacement for clear, crawlable pages.
How to measure AEO and GEO
Ask the questions your customers ask in a few AI assistants and AI search engines, and note which sites get cited. Repeat every month. Watch featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes in normal search too, because the same clear answers tend to win there.
Score any page for AEO and GEO in one click
Click the SBMM SERP Signals icon on any page and open the AEO / GEO tab. You get a score out of 100 with a list of fixes sorted by impact: answer structure, question headings, FAQs, schema, entities, trust signals and crawler access. Local businesses also get a Local AEO check inside the Business Profile Audit.
- AEO/GEO score out of 100
- Fixes sorted by impact
- Copy the report or save it as JSON or a printable page
Frequently asked questions
AEO stands for answer engine optimization: shaping a page so search engines, voice assistants and AI assistants can use it as a direct answer to a question.
GEO stands for generative engine optimization: making content easy for generative search engines and AI chat assistants to find, understand, trust and cite in the answers they write.
No. Answer engines still lean on pages that are crawlable, well structured and trusted, which is good SEO. AEO and GEO add answer-first writing, entity clarity and structured data on top.
Install the free SBMM SERP Signals extension, open your page and click the icon. The AEO / GEO tab scores the page out of 100 and lists the fixes that matter most.