What Is AEO/GEO? A Small Business Guide to Getting Cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

Search isn't just ten blue links anymore

More than half of Google searches now end without a single click. The reason: Google's AI Overviews answer the question directly, right above the search results, and a growing share of people skip Google altogether and ask ChatGPT or Perplexity instead. Gartner projects that up to 50% of search traffic could shift to AI-generated answers by 2028.

For a small business, that's a real problem hiding behind a familiar one. You might already rank on page one of Google — and still be completely invisible in the AI answer that a prospective customer actually reads.

This is what AEO and GEO are about: making sure your business shows up in that answer, not just in the list underneath it.

AEO vs GEO — what's the actual difference?

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) targets Google's AI Overviews — the AI-written summary that now appears above normal search results for a huge share of queries.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) targets being cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI assistant a question in your industry — "best AI chatbot for tradies in Melbourne", "how much does a website cost for a small business", that kind of thing.

In practice, the two overlap so much that most people just say "AEO/GEO" together. The same underlying work — clean technical access for AI crawlers, structured data, and content written in a directly quotable way — improves your odds in both.

The one thing every guide gets wrong: llms.txt isn't the answer

Most AEO/GEO advice online tells you to add an llms.txt file — a proposed standard for listing your key pages for AI systems to read. It sounds like the obvious first step, so nearly every "AEO checklist" leads with it.

Here's what most of those guides don't check: real-world request volume for llms.txt from actual AI crawlers is close to zero. Almost nothing is reading it. It's harmless to have, but it is not where the leverage is.

The work that actually matters is more boring and more effective:

• AI crawler access — is your robots.txt actually blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot? A surprising number of sites block these by accident.
• Structured data (schema.org) — does your site tell AI systems, in a machine-readable way, what kind of business you are, what you offer, and where you operate?
• Directly quotable content — does your content state clearly, in plain sentences, what you do and who you serve? Or does it bury the answer in marketing language an AI has to infer its way through?
• Technical delivery — can AI crawlers and Google's systems actually load and parse your pages quickly, without errors?

How to check where you actually stand

Most businesses have no idea whether AI tools can read their site properly, because there's no dashboard for it the way there is for Google rankings. That gap is exactly why we built a free tool to check it.

Codeteki's AI Visibility Audit scores your site across six real dimensions — AI crawler access, structured data, technical delivery, entity & authority signals, content clarity, and topic depth — and emails you a report in a few minutes. It's free, there's no sales call attached, and it tells you specifically what's holding your site back without needing you to understand the technical detail yourself.

We built it because we needed the same thing for our own site first. It runs the same checks we use internally, not a simplified marketing version.

Run your free AI Visibility Audit →

Citation vs recommendation — a distinction most businesses miss

When you check whether an AI tool "knows about" your business, there are actually two different things worth measuring, and they're not the same problem:

• Recommendation — the AI names your business as a suggested option when someone asks a relevant question, even without a link.
• Citation — your website is actually linked as a source in the AI's answer.

A business can be recommended without being cited, and cited without being recommended — these point to different fixes. If you're cited but never recommended, your content is being read but isn't positioned as a clear answer to the buyer's question. If you're recommended but never cited, the AI has picked up your brand name from somewhere (a directory listing, a review site) without ever actually reading your own website — which means you have no control over what it says about you.

What this means for an Australian small business right now

AEO/GEO isn't replacing traditional SEO — it's built on top of it. The technical foundation (site speed, crawlability, quality content) still matters exactly as much as it always did. What's changed is that the destination has split: ranking well in Google's blue links is no longer the only goal, because a growing share of your customers never scroll past the AI-generated answer at the top of the page.

The businesses that show up in that answer today have a real head start — precisely because most competitors are still only optimising for the ten blue links underneath it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between AEO and GEO?

AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) targets Google's AI Overviews — the AI-generated answer box that appears above the normal search results. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) targets being cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI assistant a question in your industry. They overlap heavily in practice — the same technical and content work improves both — which is why most people use the terms together.

Is AEO/GEO replacing traditional SEO?

No — it's built on top of it. AEO/GEO adds new requirements (clean AI-crawler access, structured data, direct-answer content) on top of the same technical foundation traditional SEO already needs. Most of what you've already invested in SEO still matters; AEO/GEO is an extension, not a replacement.

Do I need an llms.txt file to show up in ChatGPT?

Less than most SEO blogs claim. llms.txt is a proposed standard for listing your key pages for AI crawlers, but as of mid-2026 real-world request volume for it from actual AI bots is close to zero — most AI systems don't check it. It's harmless to have, but the work that actually moves the needle is making sure AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot) aren't blocked in your robots.txt, and that your content is structured so it can be quoted directly.

How do I know if AI tools can actually read my website?

Check three things: whether your robots.txt allows the major AI crawlers, whether your key pages have valid schema.org structured data, and whether your content states clearly and directly what your business does, who it serves, and where — the kind of sentence an AI could quote verbatim as an answer. Codeteki's free AI Visibility Audit checks all three automatically and emails you the results in a few minutes.

How long does it take to see results from AEO/GEO work?

There's no universal timeline — it depends on how much AI systems already know about your business and how much content needs fixing. Unlike traditional Google rankings, there's also no public "position tracker" for AI citations, which is why ongoing citation monitoring (checking whether AI tools mention and link to you for real buyer questions) matters more here than in classic SEO.