You're well aware that your potential clientele is on ChatGPT researching and evaluating your products and services. The question is how to start showing up in those conversations in the most favorable way.
That's where AEO and GEO come in. Here's the shorthand version:
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about shaping your on-page content so an AI tool can lift it directly into its answer. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is broader: it's about your credibility and presence beyond your own site, so AI tools trust you enough to cite you as a source in the first place. The two work together, but they're not the same thing, and neither one replaces good, old-fashioned SEO. My colleague, Adam, breaks it down really well in this video: The New Search Landscape: SEO vs AEO vs GEO
SEO is still the building block. A client can rank No. 1 for their SEO targets and still fall short in AEO/GEO. However, it's unlikely an LLM would ever cite a source with weak SEO. AEO and GEO extend SEO's reach into AI-driven answers rather than replacing it. (If you're newer to SEO fundamentals, our original SEO checklist is a good starting point, but as you'll see below, quite a bit has evolved since we wrote it.)
To help you get started improving your business' AI Visibility, we're unveiling Marketing Essentials' AEO/GEO checklist. Here you'll find the tools and tactics we rely on for our own clients.
I like to summarize AEO/GEO as AI Visibility - it's the marketing practice focused on how AI tools discover, understand and cite your business when someone asks a question.
Instead of crawling and ranking pages the way a traditional search engine does, generative AI tools synthesize an answer by pulling from both your website and the broader web. If the information they need is thin, outdated or missing, the AI will either skip you in favor of a competitor or guess (and guessing is always less than ideal).
Let's say you're a manufacturer of custom industrial baking pans. A prospective customer might not search “bun pans”; they might ask an LLM, “who makes strap pans for sandwich bread lines?” or “is there a bakeware supplier that works directly with engineering teams during line design?” Showing up for those specific, intent-rich questions matters more than ranking for a broad, generic term, even if fewer people are asking them. That's the AEO/GEO mindset: own the highly specific question, and you attract the right audience.
To be honest, this isn't your typical “checklist” approach. It's not like you can check all the boxes and magically start appearing as you want to in ChatGPT. But I do find this list to be helpful in identifying the gaps and opportunities in your current situation.
There are a growing number of tools that help you understand and track how your business shows up in AI-generated answers. We use these tools to analyze how you're currently performing and where there's room to improve.
Don’t overlook the power of Manual Prompt Testing. I always run my own prompts directly in ChatGPT or Claude to see exactly how the platform understands the brand and how it suggests them in the chat experience.
Once you've identified what's working and where you're falling short, you're ready to take action to improve your AI visibility. These tactics generally fall into three buckets: notability, content and technical foundation.
Notability and popularity indicators look for how well-known and credible your business appears across the web.
This is really about whether there's enough substance on your site for an AI tool to work with. If the information isn't there, it can't cite you for it.
The formatting and technical foundation are unglamorous, but they're what make your site readable and easy for LLMs to pull from.
A common question in SEO is how long it will take to see results. The jury is still out on what the answer is for AI visibility, but here are some examples that might give you an idea of what to expect.
We recently worked with a new brand that was completely unfindable in search and AI-generated results. After aligning the Google Business Profile and primary SEO elements on the website and requesting indexing, the site was showing up properly in both search and AI Mode within one month.
In another case, a manufacturing company had been on an SEO program with us for more than one year (so it had a solid SEO foundation); after performing an AI Research & Strategy and implementing the recommendations, referral traffic from AI sources more than tripled.
The best result of all is a client telling us a new customer found them through AI, which is what we keep hearing (and celebrating!) over and over the past few months.
AI visibility is still new territory, but the businesses investing in it now are positioning themselves to be the trusted answer when their customers ask. Learn more about an AI research and strategy.