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What is GEO / AEO

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are the practice of structuring your website so that generative AI search — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot — chooses it as a citation source. They differ from traditional SEO, which optimises for Google's ranked list of links, in that the goal is to be the URL the AI quotes when it composes an answer.

Why it matters in 2026

ChatGPT search, Perplexity (~$50M ARR), Gemini, and Claude (with web) reached daily-use volumes through 2025-2026. AI Overviews appear on a majority of Google English queries. For increasingly many users, the AI answer is the end of the journey — the user never visits the link unless the AI quotes you.

The three core tactics

  1. Structured data (JSON-LD): Organization, WebSite, Service, FAQPage, Person, SoftwareApplication. Makes it trivial for an AI to extract entity facts.
  2. llms.txt: a Markdown index file at the site root that summarises the site for LLMs. See our implementation guide.
  3. AI-crawler robots.txt allow: explicit Allow rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, etc.

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