AEO, GEO & AI Search Optimization

AIO (artificial intelligence optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), and GEO (generative engine optimization) are names for getting your content quoted by AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews.

Google’s own guidance on AI features in Search says it plainly: optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and that’s still SEO. The search engine giant itself says that AIO, GEO, and AEO are new labels for existing work, rather than separate disciplines with their own tactics.

You need the strategy underneath the acronyms, which you probably already have some version of: content only your business could have written, published on a site that’s easy to crawl and easy to trust. What you don’t need is a separate AI package sold on top of it.

We closely track news and updates in this industry. Our founder publishes Noise vs. Signal every month, sorting what’s actually changed in SEO and AI search from what’s being sold as urgent.

No. It’s a proposed file that would tell AI tools how to use your content, and no major AI company actually uses it. Google doesn’t read it. Independent analysis has found AI crawlers almost never request it.

It gets sold because it sounds official and it’s easy to invoice for. If it’s on a proposal you’ve been sent, you can take it off. A good website should be built to be readable by search engines and AI tools without added scripts.

No, and you should be skeptical of anyone who says they can. Google’s guidance on evaluating third-party SEO tools and services states that no third-party tool has access to its ranking data, that it doesn’t endorse any of them, and that none can guarantee performance.

There’s another major reason to be careful here. Google’s spam policies now cover generative AI responses in search, meaning attempts to manipulate AI answers are treated the same as attempts to manipulate rankings. The tricks being sold as an edge are a demotion risk. Hiring someone to do that to your site is worse than doing nothing.

What always build your site so it’s easy to crawl and understand, and with our digital strategy services we can help you plan content that’s genuinely yours, and show you how to see whether it’s working.

Almost certainly not. There’s now a switch in Google Search Console that removes your site from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and it’s tempting if you feel like AI is stealing your content and giving nothing back.

Opting out doesn’t claw anything back from what AI tools have already learned from your site. Google is explicit that sites that opt out get no traffic and no impressions from its own AI tools, and that the setting isn’t used as a ranking signal either way. You give up whatever visibility you had and receive nothing in exchange. It also costs you eligibility for the publisher link placements Google has started building into AI answers.

There’s a defensible minority who should switch it off, mainly publishers whose entire product is the article itself. That’s not the case for most of our clients.

Google added AI performance reporting to Search Console, which shows how often your pages appear in AI Overviews, AI Mode, and the AI features in Discover. You can break it down by page, country, device, and date. Two things to keep in mind. It reports impressions rather than clicks, so it tells you that you appeared, not whether appearing did anything. And it’s rolling out gradually, so it may not be in your account yet.

You can also see referral traffic from AI tools in Google Analytics 4.