Generative Engine Optimization & AEO

When A Shopper Asks AI,
Are You Named?

More of the buying decision now happens before anyone reaches your site. Someone asks ChatGPT for the best option in your category, reads four names, and clicks one. If you are not in that answer you were never in the running, and no analytics report will tell you it happened.

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Check It Yourself First

Do This First

How Can You Test This
Yourself in Sixty Seconds?

You do not need me for this part, and you should not take anyone’s word for whether you have a problem. Four steps, and you will know.

01

What question should you ask it?

Open ChatGPT and ask exactly what a customer would: “best [your product category] for [the use case you sell into]”. Not your brand name — the category.

02

What are you counting?

Write down every brand it lists. Ask twice more, in a fresh chat each time, because the answers move. Three runs is enough to see the pattern.

03

Why ask it why?

“Why those?” The answer usually cites specific pages. Those pages are your actual competition for the citation, and they are frequently not the sites outranking you in Google.

04

Repeat in Gemini and Perplexity

The overlap between them is smaller than people expect. Being cited in one says almost nothing about the others.

If you are named in every answer, you do not need this service and I will tell you so on the call. If you are named in none of them while your competitors are, that is the gap worth paying to close.

The Difference

Is This Just SEO
With a New Name?

Enough of it overlaps that anyone selling GEO as a wholly separate discipline is overselling. But the parts that differ are the parts that decide whether you get cited. Google’s own AI Features and Your Website documentation is the shortest useful version of what the overlap is, and the on-page requirements in it are largely the ones in the SEO starter guide already.

Classic SEOGEO / AEO
What wins itRanking a page above other pagesBeing the source a model quotes when it answers
Who you compete withWhoever ranks for your keywordsWhoever gets cited — often Reddit, YouTube and review sites, not your search rivals
What the unit isA keyword and a positionA question and whether your name appears in the reply
How you measure itRank tracking and clicksCitation and mention tracking, sampled repeatedly, because answers vary run to run
How fast it movesWeeks to months, fairly steadilyUnpredictably. A model update can change your visibility overnight in either direction
What carries over—Most of it. Clean structure, real expertise and being quotable have always been the job

The Work

What Are the Four Phases,
and Why That Order?

The order matters more than the list. Measuring first is what stops this becoming a retainer for activity nobody can attribute. Phase two is the only one with a definitive reference: whether a model can read the page at all comes down to page metadata and server-side rendering, not to anything proprietary.

Phase 1

Measure what is true now

  • Sample the buying questions in your category across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, repeatedly, so the number means something
  • Record which brands get named and which sources get cited
  • Separate the questions you lose from the ones nobody wins yet, because those are cheaper

Phase 2

Fix what the models cannot read

  • Product and entity markup that actually validates, not just present
  • Specifications as text rather than baked into images, which is where most Shopify stores lose
  • The unglamorous technical work: rendering, crawlability, and whether your content survives without JavaScript

Phase 3

Become the answer to something specific

  • Content built to be quoted — direct answers, real numbers, clear comparisons
  • Comparison and alternative pages, which is disproportionately what models reach for
  • The questions your customers actually ask on calls, which almost never match your keyword list

Phase 4

Get cited where the models look

  • The third-party sources that keep appearing in answers for your category
  • Review platforms, communities and roundups that carry weight in your niche
  • This is slow, it is mostly outreach, and it is the part nobody wants to sell you because it is not automatable

Straight Answer

What Can Nobody
Promise You?

Generative engine optimization is about eighteen months old as a service. Every page you will read today, including the ones outranking this one, presents it with the confidence of a settled discipline. It is not one yet, and you should be suspicious of anyone who tells you otherwise.

  • Nobody can guarantee a citation. There is no submission, no index to be included in, and no support queue to escalate to.
  • The measurement is genuinely noisy. Ask the same model the same question three times and you can get three answer sets. Anyone quoting you a single visibility score without explaining the sampling is selling a number, not a finding.
  • Attribution is worse than paid. A shopper who found you through ChatGPT often arrives as direct or branded search. You will see the lift in aggregate before you can prove it per conversation.
  • A model update can undo a quarter of work in either direction, without notice and without explanation.

Here is what I will commit to: you get the measurement before the work, you see the same numbers I do, and if the sample says you are already well represented I will tell you to spend the money on paid media instead. That is usually the honest answer for a brand under a certain size.

Fit

Is This Worth It
for Your Brand Yet?

A good fit

  • You sell a considered purchase — something people research before buying
  • Your category gets asked about in natural language, not just typed as a keyword
  • You already have real expertise or data nobody else publishes
  • You are running paid media and want to know why organic and direct are moving

Not yet

  • You are under roughly $50k a month in revenue — paid media will move the number faster
  • Your site has unresolved technical problems; fix those first, they block both channels
  • You want a guaranteed position by a date
  • You need attribution clean enough to report per order

Pricing

What Does It Cost
to Work Together?

Published, so you can rule me in or out without booking a call.

Channel Management

Starting at $1,500 /month

You own the plan. I run the channels.

  • Campaign build and management
  • Conversion tracking and reporting
  • Monthly performance call
  • SEO is not included at this tier
  • Additional channels +$500 each
  • Minimum ad spend $5,000/month
  • 6 month commitment

How one channel gets run →

Book a Call

Most Popular

Growth Partner

Starting at $4,000 /month

I own paid strategy end to end.

  • Everything in Channel Management
  • Every channel included, priced as one
  • SEO included: technical, on-page and content
  • Channel mix and budget allocation
  • Creative direction and briefs
  • Quarterly CRO roadmap
  • 25 hours a month included
  • Minimum ad spend $10,000/month
  • 3 months, then month to month

What owning the mix means →

Book a Call

Fractional CMO

Starting at $7,000 /month

I own the whole marketing function.

  • Everything in Growth Partner
  • Email, SEO and site direction
  • Contractor sourcing and management
  • Quarterly planning with you
  • 40 hours a month included
  • Minimum ad spend $20,000/month
  • 6 month commitment

What a Fractional CMO does →

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FAQ

Questions About
AI Search

If yours is not here, ask it on the call.

What does this work cost?
It is not sold on its own. This work sits inside SEO, which is included in Growth Partner, starting at $4,000 a month, and in Fractional CMO, starting at $7,000. Channel Management, starting at $1,500, does not include it. An SEO audit, from $450, is the usual way to find out whether there is anything worth doing first.
Is GEO different from AEO?
Barely, and mostly in who is saying it. Generative engine optimization usually means being cited in generated answers; answer engine optimization tends to be used for the same work with more emphasis on direct question and answer formats. In practice the work is one job and I do not price them separately.
Do I need this if my SEO is already good?
Possibly not, and that is worth finding out cheaply. Strong classic SEO correlates with being cited, because clean structure and genuine expertise help both. Run the sixty second test above. If you are named consistently, keep doing what you are doing.
How do you measure something that changes every time you ask?
By sampling rather than checking. The same question is asked repeatedly across models and over time, and the number that matters is the share of runs you appear in, not whether you appeared once. Any single screenshot of a favourable answer is meaningless and you should treat it as such when someone shows you one.
Can you do this without touching my paid media?
Yes. It is a separate engagement and it does not require me to run your ads. Most brands that take it on already work with me on Google Ads or Meta, which is convenience rather than a requirement.
What do I actually get?
A measured starting position, the technical and content work to change it, and a monthly re-sample showing whether it moved. The re-sample is the point. Without it this is a retainer for activity.
Why should I hire one person for this?
Because the discipline is new enough that nobody has a playbook worth delegating to a junior. Everything on this page is what I would do myself, which is the only thing I sell. If that sounds like a limitation rather than a feature, an agency is a reasonable choice.
What is generative engine optimization?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting a site named, quoted and linked by systems that answer a question rather than return a list of links — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews. In practice it is much less exotic than it sounds: these systems read the same web everyone else does, so most of the work is making a page state its answer plainly, early, and in language a machine can lift without mangling it.
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization is the same discipline under an older name, borrowed from the era of featured snippets and voice assistants. People use AEO and GEO interchangeably now. There is more detail on the distinction further up this page, but the short version is that the labels differ and the work does not.
What are AI Overviews?
AI Overviews are the generated answers Google places above the classic results for some queries, with a handful of supporting links. They are the reason a page can lose clicks without losing a single ranking position: the answer that used to require your page is now on the results screen.
How do you rank in AI Overviews?
By ranking in Google, first. Google’s own documentation is explicit that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations necessary to appear in AI Overviews, and that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet before it can be used at all. Anyone selling a separate AI Overviews process is selling SEO with a new invoice. What does change is which pages get used — direct answers to specific questions get quoted far more readily than pages that circle a topic.
How do you track AI Overviews rankings?
By sampling, repeatedly, and accepting that the number is noisy. The same prompt asked twice can return different sources, so one result proves nothing and a screenshot proves less. What is worth tracking is the direction of a sample over weeks — how often you appear across a fixed set of prompts — alongside the referral traffic these systems send, which is measurable and unambiguous. I will not report a citation rate as though it were a ranking.
How will AI Overviews affect SEO?
It changes what a ranking is worth rather than whether rankings matter. Informational queries an overview can answer outright lose clicks; queries where someone intends to buy, compare or hire still send people through. The practical consequence is that thin informational content gets less valuable and specific, decided, hard-to-summarise pages get more valuable.
How do you do SEO for ChatGPT?
Largely by doing SEO. These systems read the open web and lean on conventional search indexes, so crawlability, a clear entity for your brand, and pages that answer one question each do most of the work. The one real difference is format: a model lifts a sentence, not a page, so the answer has to survive being quoted on its own.

Let’s Talk

Book a free 30 minute call. I will tell you what I would do with your accounts, whether or not you hire me.

Book a Discovery Call

30-minute strategy session

Prefer to Reach Out Directly?

Happy to talk it through over email or a quick call. I usually reply within a few hours on weekdays.

Who You Talk To

Me, Every Time

What to Expect

  • 30 minutes with me, not a salesperson
  • What I would change in your account first
  • No pitch deck, no obligation