AEO and GEO: the complete guide to getting AI to recommend your business

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are the practice of preparing your business so AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews — understand you, trust you and recommend you when someone asks. AEO is about getting the AI to name your business as the answer; GEO is about getting the AI to cite your content as a source. Together they are the new way people find you: where you once fought for a spot on Google, you now fight to be inside the single answer the AI hands your customer.

This guide is the hub for everything we publish on the topic. Here I cover what AEO and GEO are, why they're urgent for every business right now, how AI engines decide who to mention, and the step-by-step plan to become the local answer. Each section links to a deeper guide so you can follow the thread wherever you need it.

What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?

AEO means optimizing your digital presence so AI answer engines understand who you are, what you do and why they should recommend you when a customer asks. Instead of showing ten blue links like classic Google, these engines hand back one answer, sometimes with two or three names. The goal of AEO is to be one of those names.

The difference from old-school SEO is structural, not cosmetic. SEO puts you on a list of results; AEO puts you inside the conversation. They don't compete — they complement each other. If you want to see where one ends and the other begins, I break it down in AEO vs SEO: how they differ and why it matters now.

What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

GEO is the practice of creating and structuring your content so generative models use it as a source when they write their answers. When ChatGPT or Perplexity build a paragraph, they pull pieces from several pages; GEO aims to make your page one of those pieces — and, better still, one of the ones cited by name with your link attached.

In practice, AEO and GEO overlap so much that most businesses treat them as one strategy. The useful distinction is this: AEO asks "does the AI recommend me?"; GEO asks "does the AI use my content?" Both answers rest on the same signals of clarity, structure and trust I lay out below.

Why do AEO and GEO matter for your business now?

Because the way people search is changing faster than ever, and customers are already on the move. Plenty of people no longer type "mechanic near me" into Google — they ask an AI "who's the best Spanish-speaking auto shop in Hialeah?" and get three names back. If you're not one of those three, you lost the customer before you knew they existed.

Three reasons this is urgent:

• The prize got concentrated. Being on page one of Google used to be enough. Now you're either in the answer or you're not. There's no visible second place.
• Almost no local business is working on it yet. There's a real first-mover advantage for whoever moves first — the same kind of window that opened in the early days of Google.
• A bilingual audience asks in two languages. Your customer talks to the AI in Spanish or English depending on the day. If your business only "exists" in one language, you disappear from half the conversations.

Google already shows AI Overviews inside its results, so this isn't some distant future — it's on the first screen of searches your customers run every day.

How do AI engines decide who to recommend and cite?

No engine publishes its exact recipe, but the pattern is consistent across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews. These are the signals that carry the most weight:

• Entity clarity. The AI has to be able to say with confidence "this business is X, it's in Y, it does Z." That takes consistent information across the web: the same name, address and phone on your site, your Google listing and your profiles.
• Machine-readable data. Schema markup gives the AI a structured summary of your business it doesn't have to guess at. I cover it in Schema markup: how to make AI understand your business.
• Content that answers, not sells. AIs favor pages that answer the question head-on, in plain text, from the first paragraph.
• Trust signals (E-E-A-T). Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Real reviews, a named author with a track record, and consistency between what you say and what other sources show about you.
• Third-party reputation. What other sites say about you — directories, local press, reviews — usually counts for more than what you say about yourself.

The core idea: the AI recommends whoever it can understand without effort and vouch for without risk. Your job is to remove the effort and the risk.

What is the concrete plan to become the answer?

This isn't magic or tricks. It's fundamentals done well, in this order:

1. Define your entity and add schema. Make it clear who you are with structured data (LocalBusiness, FAQPage, reviews) so the AI doesn't have to guess. Start with the schema markup guide.
2. Write answer-first. Open every page with the direct answer in two or three sentences, then explain. Use questions as subheads and answer them in a self-contained way.
3. Build real E-E-A-T. Sign with an author, show experience, stay consistent. The AI rewards the business that looks trustworthy from several angles.
4. Look after your reviews. Recent, specific reviews are direct fuel for getting recommended, especially in local searches.
5. Publish your llms.txt. A file that tells the models what your site is and which pages matter. I cover it in llms.txt: what it is and why your site needs it.
6. Be the local answer. Connect your business to your city and neighborhood explicitly, so the AI associates you with "near me."

Each of these steps has its own guide. For the Miami local angle, see Local GEO: how to show up in AI search in Miami.

How do you make sure ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude can read you and name you?

Everything above assumes AI assistants can get in and read your site, and plenty of websites fall short there. Then comes the other half: checking whether they actually mention you. Both are simple checks almost nobody runs.

Let the AI crawlers in

Each AI company reads the web with its own bots and publishes their names: OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot; Anthropic, the company behind Claude, uses ClaudeBot; Perplexity uses PerplexityBot. Your robots.txt file, the one that tells bots what they're allowed to visit, decides whether they get through. Check three things:

• That you're not blocking them by accident. An old rule or a copied template can lock them out. Some security and hosting services also come with settings that stop AI bots, so confirm how yours are set.
• That you can tell training from citing. Some bots collect text to train models; others search in the moment to answer a question and link to the source. You can treat them differently, but if you shut out the search bots, that AI has nothing of yours to cite.
• That your list is current. Names change, so go to each company's official page instead of copying someone else's list.

AI Overviews don't have a bot of their own: they come from Google's regular crawling, so what you do for search counts there too. And the Google-Extended token only decides whether Google can use your content in its Gemini models; it doesn't put you in or take you out of search.

Check whether they're naming you

No tool tells you exactly how often an AI recommends you, and the answers shift depending on who's asking and when. Watch several signals at once:

• Ask for yourself, with a method. Run your customers' questions, in Spanish and in English, through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. Write down who shows up and which sources get cited, and repeat them every so often to compare.
• Look at where your visits come from. In your website analytics, visits from those assistants usually show up as referrals under their name. If direct visits or searches for your brand go up, someone may have recommended you.
• Ask the customer. Add "How did you hear about us?" to your form or your first call, with AI as one of the answers.
• Keep track of your mentions. Reviews, links and citations on other sites are the raw material these tools read.

If you want to see where your foundation stands before you start measuring, the free marketing scorecard includes a section on AI visibility.

Where do I go next based on my engine or goal?

The full cluster is built so you can dig in exactly where you need to:

• For the basics: AEO vs SEO: how they differ and why it matters now and the quick explainer what AEO is and why your business should appear in ChatGPT.
• For ChatGPT: how to show up — and get recommended — in ChatGPT.
• For Perplexity: Perplexity for business: how to become a cited source.
• For Google: Google AI Overviews: how to win the AI summary.
• For Miami local: Local GEO: how to show up in AI search in Miami.
• For the technical side: schema markup for AI and llms.txt.

If you'd rather we do it for you, our AI search and SEO service measures where you stand today, fixes the foundation and shows you the progress with data. And since showing up in AI starts with content that actually answers, it usually goes hand in hand with social and content.

The search of the future has already started, and the business that moves first owns the answer. I'm Leo Brito, founder of Brito Marketing, and I've spent more than 20 years helping Miami businesses get found. If you want to know whether the AI already recommends you — and what it takes to get there — let's talk.