For years, marketers focused primarily on SEO- optimizing content to rank higher in Google search results. But search behavior is changing rapidly. More and more of your audience is now getting answers directly from AI-powered experiences like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Instead of clicking through ten blue links, users increasingly ask a question and receive a synthesized answer.
That shift has created a new challenge for marketers: How do you make sure your brand, content, and expertise show up in AI-generated answers?
That’s where AEO and GEO come in.
The tricky part is that this space is evolving incredibly fast. Best practices are changing monthly, not yearly. Search engines are updating their AI models. New platforms appear. Existing platforms change how they retrieve information, cite sources, and generate responses. The good news? While the tactics are evolving, the foundational principles are becoming clearer. Let’s start with the basics.
What Is AEO?
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. The goal of AEO is to help your content become the answer when someone asks a question. Rather than optimizing a page solely to rank in traditional search results, you’re optimizing content so AI systems and answer engines can easily identify, understand, trust, and surface your information.
Think about a question like: “What are the signs of content governance maturity?”
Instead of presenting a list of links, an AI engine may provide a direct answer that combines information from several sources.
AEO focuses on making your content:
- Easy to understand
- Well-structured
- Factually clear
- Authoritative
- Easy for machines to quote, summarize, and cite
In simple terms, SEO helped people find your content. AEO helps AI understand and use your content.
What Is GEO?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. While AEO often focuses on answering questions, GEO is a broader discipline focused on increasing your visibility inside generative AI systems.
The objective is not necessarily to rank a webpage. Instead, the objective is to influence whether AI platforms:
- Mention your brand
- Cite your website
- Quote your research
- Recommend your products
- Reference your expertise
For example, a user might ask: “Who are the leading Sitecore implementation partners?”
The AI may generate a response that references several companies based on its understanding of available information.
GEO asks questions like:
- Is my brand likely to be mentioned?
- Does the AI understand what my company does?
- Does it associate my brand with important topics?
- Do authoritative sources validate our expertise.
In simple terms: GEO focuses on increasing how often your brand becomes part of AI-generated answers.
Are AEO and GEO Different From SEO?
Yes and no. Good SEO remains incredibly important. Many of the things that help traditional search engines understand your content also help AI systems understand it.
These factors all remain valuable:
- Strong information architecture
- Clear page titles
- High-quality content
- Internal linking
- Fast page performance
- Accessible websites
- Structured data
The difference is that AI systems are often trying to answer a user’s question directly, not simply rank a webpage. As a result, content that is exceptionally clear, authoritative, and easy to summarize often performs better in AI-driven experiences than content designed primarily around traditional keyword rankings.
Think of it this way:
| SEO | AEO/GEO |
| Ranks pages | Influences answers |
| Generates clicks and traffic | Generates mentions and citations |
| Optimizes keywords | Optimizes understanding |
| Focus on search engines | Focus on AI systems |
| Measures rankings | Measures visibility and citations |
Why Is It So Hard to Keep Up?
Honestly, because nobody has all the answers yet. We’re living through one of the biggest shifts in digital discovery since Google transformed search two decades ago.
A few things make AEO and GEO especially challenging:
Every AI platform works differently
Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot don’t all retrieve and generate information the same way. Some rely heavily on live web retrieval. Others rely more on model knowledge. Some cite sources aggressively and others cite fewer references. The result is that a tactic that works well in one platform may have less impact in another.
The algorithms are changing constantly
Google may update AI Overviews several times in a year. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Perplexity continuously refine how their systems select sources and generate responses. What worked six months ago may not work as well today.
The good news is platforms such Scrunch are helping organizations track visibility in AI engines, which takes some of the onus off of individual marketers to obsess over every update to every algorithm. The reality is that marketers should think of current AEO and GEO practices as an evolving discipline rather than a settled science.
Five Things You Can Do This Week to Improve AEO/GEO Performance
The good news is that you don’t need to wait for perfect standards. There are several practical actions you can take right now.
1. Rewrite Key Pages to Answer Real Questions
AI systems love content that directly answers questions. A simple FAQ section can often improve machine understanding significantly.
Review your:
- Product pages
- Service pages
- Industry pages
- Resource centers
Ask yourself:
- What question is this page answering?
- Is the answer obvious within the first few paragraphs?
- Could an AI easily summarize this page?
Quick win: Add 5 to 10 common customer questions to your most important pages and answer them clearly.
2. Demonstrate Real Expertise
AI platforms look for signals of authority and expertise.
For example, “written by our marketing team” is weak.
“Written by Jane Smith, Sitecore Strategy MVP and 15-year digital experience consultant” provides a much stronger expertise signal.
Make sure important content includes:
- Named authors
- Professional credentials
- Industry experience
- Original research
- Case studies
- Customer success stories
Quick win: Add expert bylines and author bios to your highest-value content.
3. Improve Your Structured Data
Structured data helps machines understand content. Tools such as Google’s Rich Results Test and Schema.org documentation can help validate implementations.
Implement schema markup where applicable, including:
- FAQ Schema
- Article Schema
- Product Schema
- Organization Schema
- Review Schema
- How-To Schema
Quick win: Start by adding Organization and FAQ schema to your most important pages.
4. Increase Your Presence on Authoritative Third-Party Sources
This is one of the most overlooked GEO tactics. AI systems do not learn about your company only from your website. The more respected sources that discuss your brand, the more likely AI platforms are to associate your organization with relevant topics.
They also learn from:
- Analyst reports
- Industry publications
- Trade journals
- Association websites
- Media coverage
- Conference presentations
- Review platforms
Quick win: Identify three industry publications where your subject matter experts could contribute articles or commentary.
5. Make Your Website Easier for Machines to Read
Many websites are beautiful but difficult for machines to interpret. AI systems generally perform better when content is organized logically and written clearly.
A heading like: “Accelerating Digital Transformation Excellence” is far less informative than: “Enterprise Content Management Services” Machines, just like people, appreciate clarity.
Look for:
- Vague headings
- Marketing jargon
- Unclear navigation
- Missing metadata
- Thin content
- Orphaned pages
Quick win: Rewrite page headings so they describe exactly what the page is about.
The Most Important Thing to Remember
The biggest misconception about AEO and GEO is that they’re entirely new disciplines. In reality, most successful AEO and GEO strategies are built on an old foundation:
Create genuinely useful content, organize it well, establish credible expertise, and earn recognition from trustworthy sources.
The technologies may change. The algorithms will certainly change. New AI platforms will emerge, and today’s best practices will continue to evolve.
But organizations that consistently provide trustworthy information, demonstrate real expertise, and make their knowledge easy for machines to understand will be in the strongest position regardless of how AI search evolves.
For marketers just getting started, don’t worry about mastering every emerging tactic. Focus first on making your content clearer, more authoritative, and easier to understand. Those improvements will help people, search engines, and AI systems alike, and that’s one of the few bets in AEO/GEO that looks likely to remain true no matter how quickly the landscape changes.
