AEO and GEO in 2026

Andy Bright

Director of Product and Technology

More and more people ask an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode or Perplexity when they want to buy something. Google says⁠(opens in a new tab) AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly users, and OpenAI says⁠(opens in a new tab) more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT each week. The assistant writes an answer that names a few businesses and links to a few web pages. Answer engine optimisation (AEO), also called generative engine optimisation (GEO), is the work of making sure those answers mention your business, describe it correctly and link to your website.

This guide is for marketers, founders and small-business owners who want to understand how that works and what they can do about it. It assumes no knowledge of the subject. Each term is explained when it first appears, the glossary collects them all, and each chapter ends with what to do next. It follows one invented business, Fernhill Coffee, through the guide.

Every claim links to the source it comes from. Where a source is a study by a company that sells SEO or AI tracking tools, the guide says so. Cleotic, which publishes this guide, sells software that tracks how often AI assistants mention a business, and the guide doesn't promote it.

Start here

Read How AI assistants decide what to say about your business first. It explains how an answer is put together, step by step, and why some businesses are named and others aren't. Every other chapter builds on it.

This guide covers what's said about your business. AI crawlers are the programs AI companies use to visit and copy web pages. Making sure they can reach and read your website is covered in our technical SEO guide, and this guide links to it where it's needed rather than repeating it.

The chapters

1. How AI assistants decide what to say about your business. How an answer is put together, what AEO and GEO mean, and why some businesses are named and others aren't.
2. Where each AI assistant gets its answers. How Google's AI features, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and Siri find their sources, and how closely they follow search rankings.
3. Writing pages that AI assistants cite. What to put on your own pages, what the research shows, and what doesn't help.
4. Making sure AI assistants describe your business correctly. Why assistants get facts wrong, and how to fix them at the source.
5. Getting mentioned on other websites. Reviews, roundups, forums, Wikipedia, press coverage and video, and the rules for each.
6. Product feeds, AI shopping and apps. How products reach AI shopping results, buying inside assistants, and apps for software businesses.
7. Measuring how often AI assistants mention you. A method you can run with a spreadsheet, the measures that hold up, and how to read them.
8. Tactics to avoid, and myths to ignore. Shortcuts that break Google's rules, platform rules or the law, and claims that waste time.
9. Regulated, local and international businesses. What changes for finance, health and law, for businesses with a shop or office, and for businesses that sell abroad.
10. A 90-day plan for AI visibility. The guide turned into a week-by-week plan for a small team.
11. AEO and GEO checklist. Every check from the guide in one list, in priority order, starting with ten you can do in an afternoon.
12. Glossary. Every term used in the guide, in plain English.

If you only have time for a few, read chapters 1, 5 and 7, then use the checklist in chapter 11.

How AI answers differ from search results

Most of what helps a business appear in Google helps it appear in AI answers too. The work of appearing in search engines is called search engine optimisation (SEO). Google says its AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems", and that optimising for them is "still SEO" (Google⁠(opens in a new tab)).

Four things are different, and this guide concentrates on them.

• AI answers rely more on what other websites say about you, such as reviews, lists of recommendations and news articles, than Google's ordinary results do.
• The result isn't a position on a page. An answer mentions you, recommends you, links to you, describes you wrongly or leaves you out, and it changes each time someone asks.
• There are many assistants, and they don't all search the same collection of pages.
• No AI company tells you how often it recommends your business, so you have to measure it yourself, by asking.

What changed in 2025 and 2026

This table is mainly for readers who already know the basics and want to catch up. Each change is explained in the chapter linked from it.

Questions without a settled answer

Some questions in this area don't have an agreed answer yet. The guide sets out the evidence on each, and says what it recommends.

Whether rewriting pages "for AI" makes them more likely to be found and linked as a source is still unproven. An assistant has to find a page in its searches before it can use it. A 2026 review of 45 studies⁠(opens in a new tab) found that rewriting a page can change how an assistant uses it once found, but that no technique had yet been shown to reliably help a page get found. Chapter 3 recommends writing that is specific, sourced and clear, which helps readers either way.

Whether mentions on other websites cause AI recommendations, or just come with being well known, isn't settled. Businesses with more mentions get recommended more, but the studies can't show that one causes the other. Chapter 5 recommends earning real mentions, by the platforms' rules, because they help customers find you too.

Whether "best of" lists on your own site that rank your own business first help or hurt is disputed, with evidence on both sides. Chapter 8 recommends honest comparison pages instead.

Assistants answer from what their AI model learned in training and from pages they search for today. How much comes from each, and how quickly new models pick up changes, is unknown. Both come from the web, so the guide focuses on what the web says.

What this guide can't promise

Nothing in this guide guarantees that an AI assistant will mention or recommend your business. The assistants make their own choices, their answers change from one person and day to the next, and they change how they work without notice. Google says "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems" (Google⁠(opens in a new tab)). The same is true of any guide or consultant.

The guide explains how answers are put together, how to fix the usual reasons a business is left out or described wrongly, and how to measure whether anything has changed.

Further reading

The AI companies change their documentation often. These pages are the best places to check for changes:

• Google Search documentation updates⁠(opens in a new tab), for changes to Google Search and its AI features.
• Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search⁠(opens in a new tab), Google's guide, including the tactics it says you can skip.
• Searching the web with ChatGPT⁠(opens in a new tab), OpenAI's explanation of how ChatGPT searches.
• Bing Webmaster Blog⁠(opens in a new tab), where Microsoft announces changes to its AI reports.