GEO & AEO: Getting found by AI assistants

A growing number of prospects don't search anymore — they ask. "Who's a good HVAC company near me," "which chiropractor takes my insurance," "best-rated roofer in [city]" increasingly go to ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews instead of a search box. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are the practice of making sure your business is one of the handful of names an AI assistant actually cites back.

GEO/AEO vs. SEO

Classic SEO gets a page ranked in a list of links a person scans themselves. GEO/AEO gets a business cited and recommended inside an AI-generated answer, often with no link at all. They overlap heavily — good SEO is most of the foundation — but they're not the same target, and optimizing for one doesn't automatically win the other.

Why this matters for local and service businesses

Assistant answers to "who should I call for X near me" questions typically name a short list — three to five businesses, sometimes fewer. There's no page two. If an AI system can't confidently pull your services, service area, and credibility signals out of your page, you're invisible to that question regardless of how well you rank in traditional search.

The traffic that does arrive this way tends to convert well. Someone who asked an assistant and got your business named back arrives pre-qualified — the assistant already did the comparison shopping. That's a warmer visitor than a cold search-ad click.

What actually works (August 2026)

There is no official, universally-agreed GEO/AEO standard yet — this is an evolving area, and anyone promising a guaranteed ranking algorithm is overselling it. Here's what's grounded in current guidance and observed behavior, in rough order of confidence:

• Google is explicit that there's no special "AI file" to add. Their own guidance for AI Overviews is that the same things that make a page good for search — original, well-structured, genuinely useful content — are what gets pulled into AI answers. There's no separate AI-specific ranking track to game.
• Structured data. Marking up your page with schema.org JSON-LD — LocalBusiness (name, address, phone, hours, service area), Service, and FAQPage — gives machines an explicit place to read facts instead of inferring them from prose. This is one of the highest-confidence levers available today.
• robots.txt control over AI crawlers. You can allow or block specific bots by name: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot, and others. Some are split by purpose — you can allow a crawler that only feeds live answers while blocking the one that feeds model training, if that distinction matters to you.
• llms.txt. A plain-text file at your site root summarizing what the site is and linking to key pages, in a format some assistants can read directly. Anthropic and Perplexity have both referenced it; Google and OpenAI's mainstream products do not currently read it. Treat it as cheap insurance, not a strategy — it costs almost nothing to add and can't hurt, but it won't be the thing that gets you cited.
• Answer-shaped content. Assistants extract facts more reliably from clear, literal text than from images, PDFs, or JavaScript-rendered content they may not fully execute. Concrete claims — services offered, starting prices, areas served, credentials — stated plainly in an FAQ or services section, with real headings, extract better than the same facts buried in a hero image or a slider.

How Adsidian helps

Adsidian's landing-page review audits a page for SEO fundamentals — meta tags, viewport, structured conversion signals — and GEO/AEO readiness in the same pass: structured data, AI-crawler access, whether an llms.txt exists, and whether content is written in an extractable, answer-shaped way rather than trapped in an image. It also flags missed conversion-tracking opportunities on the page, since a visit an AI assistant sends you is wasted if you can't measure what it did next.

Run the review from a client's page in the dashboard, work through the checklist it returns, and re-run it after changes — GEO/AEO readiness isn't a one-time fix, and the guidance is still moving.

FAQ

Is GEO/AEO different from SEO? Related but distinct. SEO earns a ranked link a person clicks. GEO/AEO earns a mention inside an AI-generated answer, which may not include a link at all. Most of the same fundamentals — quality content, structured data, technical crawlability — help both, so investing in one rarely hurts the other.

Will adding an llms.txt file boost my rankings? No measurable citation lift has shown up in studies so far, and Google and OpenAI's main products don't read it at all. It's supported by a couple of assistants and costs almost nothing to add — worth doing, but don't expect it to move the needle alone.

Do I need to block AI crawlers to protect my content? That's your call, not a requirement. You can block training-oriented crawlers while still allowing the ones that power live answers — see the crawler-by-name detail above. Blocking everything means you also won't be cited.

How long until changes show up in AI answers? No fixed timeline — it varies by assistant, some pulling from a live index and others from a periodically refreshed one. Treat it like SEO: make the changes, keep the content accurate, and expect gradual improvement rather than an overnight shift.