What is AEO,and how do you get cited?

A growing share of your buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews before they ever click a website. The assistant reads the web, writes an answer and, often, names a few sources. If your business is one of them, you are part of the shortlist before the buyer has visited anyone. If you are not, you may never know the question was asked.

That is the problem AEO sets out to solve. This guide explains what it is, what actually influences whether you get cited, and what we would fix first.

AEO, GEO, LLMO: one idea, several names

AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are the two names you will see most, and you may also come across LLMO or AI SEO. They all describe the same goal: making your business easy for AI systems to understand, trust and quote. We use AEO. The labels are new. Most of the work is not.

AI assistants that browse the web still rely on pages being crawlable, clear and credible. Google says so plainly in its own guidance: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and standard SEO best practice applies. So AEO is best understood as a layer on top of good SEO, not a replacement for it. A site that confuses search engines will confuse language models too.

How AI answers choose their sources

No AI company publishes a complete ranking formula, and anyone who claims to know one is guessing. What we can observe, and what the platforms do say, points to a handful of consistent patterns:

• The page has to be reachable. If a crawler cannot fetch it, or the important content only appears after heavy scripting, it is unlikely to be used.
• The answer has to be easy to lift. Clear headings, a direct answer near the top, and specific facts are easier to quote than a vague paragraph.
• The source has to look credible. Assistants tend to prefer sources that other sources agree with and refer to.
• The entity has to be unambiguous. If the model is not sure who you are, what you do or where you operate, it will hedge or pick someone else.

The practical work follows from those four points.

1. Entity clarity: make it obvious who you are

An entity is a thing a machine can identify: your company, your founder, your products, your location. Language models build their picture of an entity from everything they read about it. If that picture is inconsistent, your citations suffer.

• Use one consistent business name, description, address and phone number across your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories.
• Give every core service its own clear page. Do not tangle commercial and informational intent on the same URL.
• Write an About page that states plainly what you do, for whom, and where. Plain beats clever here.
• Make sure people and products have their own pages where it makes sense, with links between them.

When we took on SEO for Future Forex, clarity came first. Business and personal services were tangled together, so we separated them into distinct journeys before chasing anything else. Search engines, and the AI systems built on top of them, need to know which page answers which question.

2. Structured data: labels, not magic

Structured data (schema.org markup, usually in JSON-LD) labels the facts on a page: this is an organisation, this is its logo, this is a service, these are frequently asked questions, this article was written by this person on this date.

It helps machines read your pages accurately, and it supports rich results in Google. Google’s guidance is also clear that no special schema is needed for AI features. So add it because it makes your facts unambiguous, not because it guarantees a citation. The useful basics for most businesses:

• Organization (or LocalBusiness) on the home page, with name, logo, contact details and links to your official profiles.
• Service or Product on the pages that sell.
• Article with author and date on editorial content.
• FAQPage where you genuinely answer common questions on the page.

Keep the markup honest. It must match what a human sees on the page.

3. Quotable, sourced content

This is where most of the effort should go. AI answers are built from sentences, so write sentences worth lifting.

• Answer the question early. Put a direct, one- or two-sentence answer under the heading, then expand.
• Be specific. Numbers, ranges, timeframes, named steps. "Orders ship within three working days" is quotable. "Delivery times vary" is not.
• Show your working. Cite sources for any statistic, link to them, and date your content. We apply the same rule internally: claims need a source or they are cut.
• Use your own data. First-hand results and original analysis give an assistant something it cannot find elsewhere.
• Structure for scanning. Descriptive headings, short paragraphs, lists and tables where they help.

This is also simply good writing for humans. Pages built this way tend to convert better, which matters, because a citation is only worth something if the visit that follows turns into an enquiry.

4. Reviews, mentions and links

Assistants weigh what others say about you, not just what you say about yourself. The signals that build trust in classic SEO carry over:

• Reviews on Google and on the platforms your buyers use, answered professionally.
• Mentions and links from relevant publications, associations, partners and clients.
• Consistent listings in reputable directories for your industry.
• A clean backlink profile. Toxic or irrelevant links are worth reviewing and, where needed, disavowing.

For Future Forex, authority building and hygiene went hand in hand: 127 new referring domains over twelve months, alongside a clean-up of low-quality links. That is slow, unglamorous work. It is also what moved the needle.

5. llms.txt: an emerging convention, not a standard

You may have heard that you need an llms.txt file. Here is the honest picture.

llms.txt is a proposal, first published in 2024, for a Markdown file at the root of a website that summarises the site and points AI agents to its most useful pages. Its own documentation describes it as a proposal, not an official standard. Some sites and documentation platforms publish one. Google, for its part, says you do not need to create special AI text files to appear in its AI features.

Our view: it is cheap to add and can be a useful, tidy summary of your site. It is not a ranking factor anyone has confirmed, and it will not rescue a site with weak content or unclear structure. Do the fundamentals first. Add llms.txt if you like, and keep it accurate.

6. Measure AI citations, carefully

This is the least mature part of AEO, and it pays to be honest about that.

• Search Console: Google includes traffic from AI features within its standard Performance report under the Web search type. There is no separate AI Overviews report, so watch overall trends on the pages you are optimising.
• Referral traffic: visits from assistants such as ChatGPT or Perplexity often appear as referrals in your analytics. Track them as their own channel.
• Prompt tracking: keep a fixed list of the questions your buyers ask, run them in each assistant on a schedule, and record whether and how you are cited. Answers vary from run to run, so look for patterns over weeks, not single results.
• Ask new leads. "How did you hear about us?" now has a new possible answer. Add it to your form.

With Future Forex we tracked early AI citations as an emerging layer, not the core lever. The core lever was classic SEO done with discipline: a clear site structure, pages submitted and tracked until they were indexed, and authority built steadily. Over twelve months that produced a 4 220% increase in organic clicks, 45 keywords on page one and first place for terms like "forex south africa". The AI citations followed the fundamentals, not the other way round.

What we would fix first

If you are starting from scratch, this is the order we would work in:

1. Check that your important pages are crawlable, indexed and fast.
2. Untangle your site so each service and each question has one clear page.
3. Make your business facts consistent everywhere, and add Organization markup.
4. Rewrite your top commercial and FAQ pages to answer questions directly, with sources.
5. Build real mentions and reviews, and clean up bad links.
6. Set up a simple citation-tracking routine, and review it monthly.

AEO is not a shortcut around SEO. It rewards the same things good search always has: clarity, credibility and content that is genuinely useful. If you would like to know where you stand today, our SEO & AEO team will audit both your rankings and your AI visibility and show you what to fix first.

Sources

1. Google Search Central — AI features and your website
2. llms.txt — The /llms.txt file proposal

Written by Liam Davies. Researched with AI assistance, reviewed and fact-checked by a person — how we use AI.