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Service — AEO & GEO

AEO & GEO Services

Answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO) make your business something AI systems can find, understand and cite. I build that layer into the website itself — structure, schema, entity data and machine-readable files.

01 The short version

People now ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini the questions they used to type into a search box — including “who should I hire?” and “which company is best for this?”. Those systems answer from sources they can crawl, parse and verify. AEO and GEO are the work of becoming one of those sources.

Answer engine optimization (AEO) is about being the direct answer: content structured so a machine can lift a correct, self-contained reply to a specific question. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is about being cited and recommended inside a generated response, which depends on consistent entity information, evidence, and corroboration beyond your own site. In practice they are one job, and both sit on top of sound technical SEO.

This website is my working example. It publishes llms.txt files, explicit crawl rules for AI crawlers, structured data on every page and answers written to be quoted — and clients have found me through ChatGPT. I apply the same method to client sites as the developer who implements it, not as a consultant who recommends it.

02 How it works

What goes into it.

6 chapters

  1. 01

    What AEO and GEO are — and what they are not

    AEO and GEO are not a hack, a plugin or a secret prompt. No one can force an AI system to recommend a business, and nobody outside those companies controls what their models say. Anyone selling guaranteed placement in ChatGPT is selling something they cannot deliver.

    What the work does is remove the reasons an AI system would skip you: content it cannot reach, pages it cannot parse, facts that contradict each other, claims nothing else on the web supports. Google's own guidance says AI Overviews need no special markup — the foundations are the same ones that make a page eligible for ordinary search. That is why I treat AI search visibility as an extension of SEO, not a replacement for it.

  2. 02

    Access first: can AI crawlers actually read your site?

    Before any content work, I check whether the systems you want to be cited by can reach your pages at all. It is common to find a site whose robots.txt, firewall or CDN bot-protection is silently blocking AI crawlers, or whose content only appears after JavaScript runs — which many AI crawlers do not execute.

    I also publish llms.txt and llms-full.txt: plain-text summaries of who you are and what you offer, written for language models. To be straightforward about it, llms.txt is a proposed convention rather than a standard, and no major AI company has confirmed it affects what its assistant says. It costs almost nothing to maintain when generated from your real content, so I include it — but I will not sell it to you as the thing that makes the difference.

    • robots.txt rules reviewed for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others
    • Firewall and CDN settings checked so legitimate AI crawlers are not blocked by accident
    • Important content present in the server-rendered HTML, not only after scripts load
    • A clean XML sitemap with honest last-modified dates
  3. 03

    Content an answer engine can quote

    Generative systems assemble answers from passages. A passage gets used when it answers a question completely by itself, without needing the three paragraphs around it. So the writing changes: the direct answer goes first, the elaboration follows, and each section stands on its own.

    I restructure key pages around the questions your customers actually ask — taken from Search Console queries, sales conversations and support messages — and build FAQ content that answers them specifically rather than vaguely. Vague marketing copy is not wrong; it is simply never the passage that gets quoted.

    • Headings phrased as the questions people ask
    • A direct, self-contained answer in the first sentence or two
    • Specifics over adjectives: what, where, for whom, how it works
    • The business named where it matters, so a quoted passage still identifies you
    • Facts stated once and kept identical everywhere they appear
  4. 04

    Entities and schema: being a known thing, not just a page

    AI systems reason about entities — a business, a person, a service, a place — and the relationships between them. Your site should say, unambiguously and in a machine-readable way, who you are, what you offer, where you operate and who is behind the content.

    I write that as JSON-LD structured data: organization or local business, people, services, FAQs and articles, linked together and to your profiles elsewhere. Then I validate it and make sure it matches what is visibly on the page. Schema that claims more than the page shows does more harm than none.

  5. 05

    Evidence beyond your own website

    An assistant deciding whether to recommend a business looks for corroboration: do other sources describe this business the same way? That is why profiles, listings, reviews and mentions matter for AI visibility, just as they do for local SEO.

    My part is making the foundations consistent — your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and other key profiles saying the same thing as the site — and giving you content worth citing: real case studies, real process, real answers. I do not buy mentions or fabricate reviews. Beyond being dishonest, it is fragile: the systems you are trying to convince get better at spotting it every year.

  6. 06

    Measuring AI visibility honestly

    There is no Search Console for ChatGPT, so anyone showing you a precise “AI ranking” is showing you an estimate. What can be measured is still useful, and I set it up so you can watch it yourself.

    Results are not instant and not guaranteed. Assistants that search the live web can reflect changes once your pages are recrawled; what a model learned in training updates far more slowly. Plan in months, and judge the work by what was actually shipped and what the data shows.

    • Visits arriving from AI assistants, tracked as referrals in GA4
    • AI crawler activity in your server logs
    • Search Console impressions and clicks, which include Google's AI features
    • A fixed set of questions asked to the main assistants, re-checked on a schedule

03 Deliverables

What you get.

9things you own at the end

  • 01AI visibility audit: how your business appears in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity for a fixed set of questions
  • 02AI crawler access review: robots.txt, firewall and CDN rules, rendering, sitemap
  • 03llms.txt and llms-full.txt generated from your real content
  • 04JSON-LD schema for your organization, people, services, FAQs and articles — validated
  • 05Entity consistency: name, services, location and profiles aligned everywhere
  • 06Key pages restructured for direct answers, with question-led headings
  • 07FAQ content built from the questions your customers actually ask
  • 08The technical SEO the AI layer depends on: speed, semantic HTML, crawlability
  • 09Measurement: AI referral tracking in GA4 and a repeatable prompt check

04 Questions

Asked before every build.

Something else on your mind? Ask me on WhatsApp.

01

What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) helps your pages rank in search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) structures content so it can be used as the direct answer to a question — in featured snippets, voice results and AI answers. GEO (generative engine optimization) aims to have your business cited or recommended inside AI-generated responses from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. They overlap heavily: AEO and GEO build on technical SEO, clear content and consistent business information.

02

Can you guarantee that ChatGPT will recommend my business?

No. Nobody outside OpenAI, Google or Anthropic controls what their models say, and anyone who guarantees a recommendation is misleading you. What I commit to is the work that makes a recommendation possible: AI crawlers can reach your site, your content answers real questions directly, your business information is consistent everywhere, and your structured data is valid.

03

Do I need an llms.txt file?

It is optional. llms.txt is a proposed convention — a plain-text summary of your site written for language models — and no major AI company has confirmed that it changes what its assistant says. I publish one because it is cheap to maintain when generated from your real content and it gives AI systems a clean, accurate summary to read. It is a small part of the work, not the core of it.

04

Should I allow or block AI crawlers?

It is your decision, and it does not have to be all or nothing. Some crawlers collect content to train models; others fetch pages to answer a live question or to build an AI search index. A business that wants to be recommended should at least allow the search and user-requested crawlers. A publisher protecting paid content may choose differently. I explain what each crawler does and configure robots.txt to match your decision.

05

How long does AEO and GEO take to show results?

Plan in months rather than weeks. Assistants that search the live web can reflect your changes once the pages have been recrawled, while knowledge a model picked up in training updates much more slowly. I set up AI referral tracking in GA4 and a fixed set of test questions at the start, so progress is visible in data rather than in a sales narrative.

06

Is AEO/GEO a separate project from SEO?

It does not need to be. AI systems draw on the same foundations as search engines — crawlable pages, clean structure, fast loading, valid schema — so a site with weak technical SEO has to fix that first. Because I do both, the AI layer is added as part of the SEO work, or on top of an existing site that is already technically sound.

05 Next step

Let's talk AEO & GEO.

Tell me about the business. You’ll get an honest plan, a fixed quote and a timeline.