Guide · What AEO is
What is AEO?The short answer,and the long one.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO), also called generative engine optimisation (GEO), is the work of getting a brand named and cited in the written answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews give buyers. SEO gets a page ranked in a list of links. AEO gets a company into the one answer the buyer actually reads.
How an AI answer differs from a search result
A search result is a list. The buyer scans ten links, opens two or three, and decides. An AI answer is a paragraph with a shortlist in it. The buyer reads the names, sometimes asks a follow-up, and decides. There is no page two.
The shortlist is short. In our payroll and HRMS study, 40 buyer questions run on four engines, the average answer named 5.1 brands on ChatGPT, 4.7 on Perplexity, 6.0 on Gemini and 7.4 on Google AI Overviews. A brand that is not one of those five or six names is not a runner-up. It is absent.
That is the whole reason AEO exists as separate work. Being on page one of Google is not the same as being in the answer, and the answer is where the search now stops.
AEO versus SEO
| SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are optimising for | A page's position in a list of links | A brand's presence in one written answer |
| Unit of success | Rank and click-through | Named or not, per question, per engine |
| Where the decision is made | Google's index and ranking systems | Whatever pages each engine retrieves and reads for that question |
| What moves it | Links, on-page relevance, technical health | How often the brand appears across the sources the engine reads, and whether those pages state facts it can quote |
| How you measure it | Rank tracking, Search Console | Run the buyer's questions, count who is named |
| What a page needs | To rank | To be readable by the crawler and quotable in one sentence |
The two overlap. Google's AI Overviews are built on Google's ordinary ranking, so a site that cannot rank will struggle there. But ranking is not sufficient. In the payroll study, five companies on Google's first page for a buyer question were named in none of the answers to it.
How AI assistants decide which brands to name
The engines count. For a category question they retrieve a set of pages, roundups, review sites, forums and vendor pages, and name the brands that recur across that set. Perplexity says so in its own wording: the names that show up most consistently across recent lists, the most consistently cited firms, brands repeatedly described as affordable in India-focused roundups.
Three things follow. A brand has to be present on the sources the engine reads, not just on its own site. Its positioning has to exist as a sentence a page actually states, because the engine quotes rather than infers. And the trust questions, is it legit, is it worth it, are answered from whichever review profile the engine finds, including the harshest one.
Being read is not being named. In our August 2026 sweep, Vaaree's own site was the second most cited source in its category and the brand was still named in only 16 of 30 answers, against Pepperfry's 23. The full mechanism is on its own page: how AI assistants choose the brands they name.
What AEO work involves
- Crawler access. Check that GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and ClaudeBot can fetch the site, and fix robots rules, client-side rendering and pages hidden behind scripts. Cloudflare's block-AI-bots setting is on by default for many sites and removes them from every AI answer without a warning.
- Schema. Mark up pricing, comparison and FAQ pages with Organization, Product, Offer in rupees and FAQ, so each engine can parse what is already published.
- Entity facts. An llms.txt, a clean sitemap, and one consistent set of facts about the company: name, founded, headquarters, pricing.
- Briefs, not ghostwriting. For each buyer question, a page-level brief: which page answers it, what it must state, in what order. The client's team writes; the agency checks before it goes live.
- The third-party record. G2, Capterra, SoftwareSuggest, Reddit and the category's roundups, audited for missing, wrong or rupee-less entries.
- Measurement. Re-run the questions, per engine, and fix what moved.
What AEO does not do
It does not buy placement. There is no ad slot inside a ChatGPT answer, and no engine sells one. The brands that hold the shortlist today hold it because they appear across the sources the engine counts, which is also why it keeps compounding for them.
It does not guarantee an outcome. Answers vary between runs, engines change their sources, and the consumer apps add personalisation that no audit fully captures. What can be promised is measurement: the share of answers that name you, per engine, against a baseline, and the work that moves it.
Questions
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice yes. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) both describe getting a brand named and cited in AI-generated answers. Some people use GEO for the content side and AEO for the technical side. The engines do not care what it is called.
Do I still need SEO if I do AEO?
Yes. Google AI Overviews draw on Google's ordinary ranking, and most of the sources ChatGPT and Perplexity read are pages that rank somewhere. AEO sits on top of a site that can already be crawled and indexed. It does not replace that.
Which AI engines matter for an Indian brand?
ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. OpenAI reported 100 million weekly ChatGPT users in India in February 2026, a figure it published itself. Which engine matters most for a given brand depends on which page types that brand's category publishes, and it differs brand by brand.
Can you pay to be recommended by ChatGPT?
No. None of the engines sells placement inside an answer. Brands get named because they recur across the pages the engine reads for that question.
How long does AEO take to show results?
Technical fixes take effect as soon as the engines re-crawl, typically weeks. Presence on third-party sources builds more slowly and compounds. We do not promise a timeline; we re-run the questions and report what moved.