What each of the three terms competes for
SEO (search engine optimization) competes for ranking in search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) competes to become the direct answer shown above those results. GEO (generative engine optimization) competes to be cited inside AI-generated answers. The three share one base: the page must first be indexed by the search engine, and the content must then be written so that it can be cited. The order of work follows from that: indexing first, citable content second, and markup and crawler settings last.
This article is the overview of the topic. For a 3D or single-page application site, continue with search and AI crawler readability for 3D websites. For slow pages, read Web 3D loading performance engineering.
To see how an AI system retrieves pages first and then writes an answer from what it retrieved, read RAG. Being cited, which is what GEO is about, is an outcome of that process.
AEO and GEO are industry terms, not standards set by any search engine. Google's position is that general SEO best practices still apply, and that appearing in its AI features requires no new machine-readable files, no AI text files and no special markup (Google Search Central, AI Features). The three terms work better as three goals than as three separate engineering projects.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank and clicks | The direct answer | Citation in AI answers |
| Where | Google and Bing results | Featured snippets, Q&A blocks | AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity |
| Content focus | Matches the query, indexable | Answer in the first sentence | Facts, sources, figures |
| Measure | Impressions, clicks, rank | Snippet impressions | Citations, AI referral traffic |
The website side
- Crawlable HTML
- Direct answers and facts
- Structured data
Search and AI engines
- Crawling and indexing
- Retrieval and ranking
What the user sees
- Ranked linksSEO
- Direct answerAEO
- Citation in an AI answerGEO
Schematic flow. Each engine indexes and ranks in its own way.
The shared base: get crawled and indexed
Without indexing, none of the three matters. For Google to treat a page as a cited source in AI Overviews and AI Mode, the page must already be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet, and meeting those conditions still does not guarantee it will appear. The five items below are the places most worth checking at the indexing stage.
- Important text must be in the source HTML. The source HTML is the page code a crawler receives on its first fetch. In a single-page application the screen is assembled by the browser after JavaScript loads, so the source often holds only an empty container. Google can index only what it sees after rendering, rendering runs only when resources allow, and not every bot executes JavaScript (Google Search Central, JavaScript SEO basics). On the previous version of the POLISH website, one before-and-after comparison of prerendering showed the home page source growing from 730 bytes to 39,516 bytes with no change on screen. The method is described in the prerendering comparison.
- Pages that should stay out of the index use noindex, not a robots.txt block. Noindex is a mark on the page that says do not index. A page blocked by robots.txt keeps that mark out of the crawler's reach, so the page can still appear in results because of links from elsewhere (Google Search Central, noindex).
- Mistyped addresses must return 404. If a nonexistent address returns a success status and shows home page content, it is likely to be treated as a valid page.
- A multilingual site must list, on every language version, itself and all the other versions. This markup is called hreflang. If two pages do not point to each other, the markup is ignored (Google Search Central, localized versions).
- The pages that best answer buyer questions, such as the process, the FAQ and the security notes, must be open to indexing and linked from other pages on the site.
SEO: pages that match the buyer's question
SEO starts with a page that matches what the buyer asks. The title, which is the label in the browser tab and the search result, and the h1, which is the main heading of the page, should use the buyer's own wording, be descriptive, and not exaggerate. Content should be written mainly for people, with a clear account of who wrote it (Who), how it was made (How) and why (Why) (Google Search Central, helpful content).
The volume of articles is not the goal. Google's spam policies treat the mass production of pages with no added value, made in order to rank, as abuse, whether the pages are written by people or by AI (Google Search Central, spam policies). Each page should answer one question a buyer really asks, and a page that cannot should not exist.
Page speed also needs a look. LCP measures how long the largest image or text block in the first screen takes to appear, and a good result is within 2.5 seconds (Walton and Pollard, 2019). INP measures how the page responds overall to interactions such as clicks and typing, and a good result is under 200 milliseconds (Wagner and Pollard, 2022). Both are judged at the 75th percentile, with mobile and desktop counted separately. A 3D-heavy site needs these two measured separately, and the method is in measuring and fixing Web 3D performance.
POLISH's SEO, GEO and AEO service follows this order and starts with an indexing check.
AEO: the first sentence is the answer
The AEO method is plain: right after the h1 of each page, put one paragraph that answers directly, and write the subheadings in the words a buyer would use, as statements. With the answer first, a reader does not have to scroll for it, and a system that extracts text has a ready paragraph to take.
Whether a page becomes a featured snippet, the answer box at the top of search results, is decided by Google's systems. A site cannot nominate itself with markup and can only opt out, using nosnippet or data-nosnippet (Google Search Central, featured snippets). What a site can do is write the answer clearly.
FAQ markup is not a shortcut. FAQ rich results, the expandable question-and-answer lists in search results, stopped appearing in Google Search as of May 7, 2026 (Google Search Central, latest documentation updates). Structured data, which is a set of notes in the page for machines to read, must truthfully reflect the page, must not mark up content the reader cannot see, and does not guarantee display even when the rules are met (Google Search Central, structured data guidelines).
Every sentence in an FAQ is a public claim and has to match the real product. The FAQ of the Cooking Monsters AI menu generation platform lists facts that need confirming: which language model is connected, where the data comes from, and how fees are calculated. On July 2, 2026 each item was checked against the actual product, and on August 3, 2026 the FAQ began to be supplied from the back-end database, so when the product changes, the page does not stay on the old wording.
GEO: make the content worth citing
The GEO paper tested nine methods using GEO-bench and Perplexity.ai. Adding cited sources and statistics raised the visibility of content in generated answers, by up to 40% according to the abstract, but the effect depended on a source's rank, and the source ranked first actually declined (Aggarwal et al., 2024). The test environment is not the real ranking of Google or ChatGPT, so the figures show a direction only.
In practice, the facts on a page should be able to point to a source: a number comes with its measurement conditions and date, and a claim comes with external material. A citation is also not the same as support. An audit of four generative search engines found that on average 51.5% of generated sentences were fully supported by citations, and 74.5% of citations supported the sentence it was attached to (Liu et al., 2023). The facts on a site's own pages therefore need to be explicit and checkable.
Crawlers should be read separately. OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot is used for search indexing, GPTBot for training, and ChatGPT-User for browsing when a user asks a question (OpenAI, crawler overview). Perplexity likewise separates PerplexityBot from Perplexity-User (Perplexity, crawler guide). Once separated, a site can decide which kinds to allow and which to block.
On one large educational event website, search and assistant crawlers are all allowed and training-only crawlers are blocked. The robots.txt file is a request made to crawlers, not access control (Koster et al., 2022), so content that must stay private depends on login and permissions. The settings are described in how crawlers are split.
The llms.txt file comes later in the order. It is a proposal made in 2024, not a formal standard (Howard, 2024), and Google says no such file is needed. If one is made, it should be generated from the same data as the site, or it will drift from what is on screen after a redesign.
Where the budget goes
On November 4, 2026, the development team opened Google in a browser (hl=zh-TW, gl=tw) and checked the first page of organic results for 20 buyer questions. An AI Overview appeared for 3 of the 20 questions. Of the 15 buyer questions written in Traditional Chinese, only 1 had one. This is a single snapshot from a single location and serves as a reference only.
For the Traditional Chinese market, then, the budget goes first to indexing and content, not to AI markup. The share of AI Overviews changes, so the check should be repeated on a schedule. Any promise of a guaranteed ranking or a guaranteed AI citation does not hold, and Google itself states there is no guarantee.
Each step builds on the one before it.
How to measure
- Search Console, Google's site performance tool, shows impressions and clicks. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is counted in the Performance report under the "Web" search type.
- Server logs show whether crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot visit, and which pages are fetched.
- Site analytics show whether the referral sources include chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai.
- A fixed set of buyer questions is sampled on a schedule, with the date, location and engine recorded, because AI answers can differ each time.
When this is not a fit
- Short-lived campaign pages. Search results build up over time and cannot catch up with the campaign window, so advertising fits better.
- Internal systems that are not open to the public. With no search entry point, this work has no audience.
- Products whose buyer questions are still unclear. Interviews come first, to find out what buyers actually ask, and content comes after.
What to prepare
- The website address and Search Console access
- The 10 questions buyers ask most often
- The facts, numbers and sources that should be cited
- Whether the site uses 3D or is a single-page application
With these in hand, contact the development team to start the indexing check. For vendors still being compared, see how to evaluate a software vendor.
