AEO is how you show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. GEO is how you show up in Google's AI Overviews. Different surfaces, the same playbook, and most agencies have not built the muscle for either.
Half of all searches now end inside an AI generated answer. Most brands are not cited there, not because their content is weak, but because the underlying signals AI engines trust have never been built.
Entity coherence
Most brands have no coherent entity profile. Schema is incomplete or wrong, Knowledge Graph entries have gaps, Wikidata is silent. ChatGPT and Perplexity build their understanding of a brand from these sources, and yours may be a stranger to them.
Without entity coherence you don't get cited, you get confused with someone else
Extractability
AI engines pull short, definitive answers from long pages. If your content is not structured for extraction, with clear answer blocks, scannable headers and comparison tables, it gets skipped even when it is the best answer available.
AI rewards extractability over depth. Both, ideally
Citation graph
Language models cite a small, stable set of source types: Reddit threads, Wikipedia, established publications, Pinterest for visual queries. If your brand is not mentioned in those, you are not in the pool, regardless of how well you rank on Google.
AI doesn't crawl the web. It quotes the web's most cited sources
About 40% of this work makes your classic SEO better as a side effect. The other 60% is genuinely new: entity, extraction, citation seeding and AI tracking.
Make AI engines understand who you are.
Make every page liftable as an answer.
Show up in the sources language models trust.
Know exactly where you're cited, and where you're not.
AEO and GEO are a six to twelve month compounding game, the same as classic SEO but on a different surface. Citations do not appear on day three. They appear when entity, extraction and signal work compound.
Where do AI engines currently surface you, and where do they surface competitors instead? We map visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews, audit entity coherence and schema coverage, and hand you a complete citation map by the end of week one.
Schema deployment, Wikidata correction, Knowledge Graph alignment. Existing pages restructured for extraction with answer blocks, FAQ schema and comparison tables. First content commissioned around the prompts your buyers actually ask.
Reddit presence built in target communities. Pinterest visual citations where the category supports it. Strategic publication mentions. By the end of month three you should see your first citations on long-tail prompts. Early, but real.
Citation rate compounds and new prompts surface you. By month six, brand-adjacent prompts surface you across multiple AI surfaces. By month twelve you are a citation default in your category, and competitors starting later have to fight uphill to displace you.
AI citation is genuinely new. Most agencies showing AEO case studies are showing SEO results rebranded. We will not fake it. What we will do is be specific about what compounds, when, and what sits outside any agency's control.
We don't promise +700% organic traffic on AEO. The discipline is too young for numbers like that to be honest yet. What we promise is that by month six you are cited where you were not, and by month twelve you are cited consistently.
Schema, entity and content restructuring shipped. No citations yet, and that is normal.
Long-tail prompts start surfacing your brand. AI Overviews begin including you.
Your brand surfaces across multiple AI surfaces for core category prompts.
Your brand becomes the default reference in your category, and is hard to displace.
AEO tooling is younger than SEO tooling. Some of these are platforms, some are APIs, and some are workflows we built ourselves. All of them touch your account every week.
AEO and GEO are a young discipline. The honest fit list is shorter and stricter than for classic SEO, but that is where the compounding wins live.
AEO and GEO are new enough that most prospects walk in confused. These are the answers we give on audit calls, laid out so you do not have to ask.
AEO, answer engine optimization, is how you show up inside chat assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. GEO, generative engine optimization, is how you show up inside Google's AI Overviews and similar generative surfaces. Different surfaces, mostly the same playbook. Most practitioners use the terms interchangeably and we do not argue about the labels.
No, but the overlap is real. Roughly 40% of this work, schema markup, entity architecture and content quality, also helps classic SEO. The other 60% is genuinely different: structuring content for extraction rather than ranking, seeding the citation sources models trust, and tracking AI mentions across surfaces. That work does not exist in classic SEO.
The opposite. Schema improvements help both, and content restructured for extraction tends to perform better in classic search too, because clear answer blocks reduce bounce rates and increase dwell time. You compound rather than trade off.
Weekly tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews. We log the specific prompts your buyers might ask, run them at regular intervals, and capture which surface your brand, which surface competitors, and which surface nobody. You watch the citation map move month over month on a live dashboard.
Because the discipline is young enough that anyone showing one is either presenting classic SEO results rebranded, or showing month-three early wins they hope you do not probe. We will not fake it. Our SEO case studies already include AEO citation work as a contributing factor. Real AEO case studies with isolated impact are being built now.
Together, ideally. Most clients run them as one engagement because the foundation work overlaps and running them separately costs more. If you must pick one to start, choose SEO, not because AEO matters less but because SEO foundations make the AEO work easier. You build the entity layer once and both disciplines use it.
Voice search collapsed into AI assistant queries. The optimization for both is now the same work, so if you are optimized for AEO you are optimized for voice as a side effect. We do not sell voice search separately because there is no separate work to sell.
No, and anyone who does is misleading you. AI citation depends on factors no agency controls: model training cycles, retrieval changes, query routing, and source availability at the moment someone prompts. What we promise is the work that compounds, and the outcome follows.
A free 30 minute AEO audit. We map where AI engines currently surface your brand against your top competitors, identify the highest-leverage gap to fix first, and give you the citation map to keep.