AEO and GEO: how AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend
When someone asks an AI assistant "who is a good structural engineer in Sydney's inner west?", the assistant does not consult a ranking. It searches, reads a handful of pages, extracts facts it is confident about, and answers. Two disciplines have grown up around that behaviour: answer engine optimisation (AEO), making your pages easy to extract answers from, and generative engine optimisation (GEO), making your business easy to describe accurately. Neither is mysterious.
What assistants actually need
- A clear entity. One business name used consistently in the visible copy, the page titles, the og:site_name tag and the schema. When these disagree (a stale site name left over from a template is common), the assistant either picks one at random or leaves you out.
- Structured data that matches the page. Organization or LocalBusiness schema with name, address, phone, area served and the services you offer. Service and FAQPage schema where the page has that content. Schema that claims things the page does not show lowers confidence in both.
- Question-shaped pages with direct answers. A heading that asks the question a customer asks, followed by a two-sentence answer, followed by detail. Assistants quote the two sentences.
- Plain facts in plain prose. "SYD Engineers is a structural and stormwater engineering consultancy in Sydney, established in ..." is quotable. "Providing solutions that are efficient, economic and elegant" is not a fact and cannot be cited.
- Proof that can be summarised. Case studies with a location, a problem and an outcome; credentials spelt out; the court, board or standard named. Assistants prefer businesses they can describe specifically.
- A machine-readable summary. An llms.txt file at the site root (a short markdown page: who you are, what you do, where, and links to key pages) is cheap and increasingly read.
What does not help
Stuffing the word "AI" into headings, publishing hundreds of thin location pages, or buying "AI visibility" tools that report scores they cannot explain. Assistants reward the same things careful readers reward: clarity, consistency and proof.
How to check where you stand
Search your own business name and your main service in an assistant of your choice and read what it says. Then compare that with what your site actually states in plain words. The gap is your AEO/GEO to-do list. The AEO and GEO Readiness Audit does this systematically: it measures entity consistency and schema coverage across your pages, runs a brand search sample, and writes the llms.txt, FAQ schema and entity paragraph for you to paste in.