GuideWhen the buyer asks an AI
AI search (AEO / GEO)
Definition
Being named or cited in the answer an AI assistant writes when someone asks it a question your company answers well. AEO and GEO are competing names for the practice of earning that place; neither name has settled, and neither has the practice.
How it works
An assistant composes its answer from two supplies: what its model absorbed in training, and what it retrieves from the web at the moment of the question. Retrieval favours pages that answer a specific question in plain, quotable sentences near the top. The work is therefore old-fashioned: decide which buyer questions you want to be the source on, and publish the clearest written answer to each that exists anywhere. A search engine hands the reader a list of links to choose between; an assistant hands over one written answer and the few sources behind it.
What to watch for
Nobody outside the model’s owner controls what it writes, so a pitch promising guaranteed placement in AI answers is promising more than anyone can deliver; the contract shows what is committed to. Measurement is early; an assistant answers many questions without sending a click, so your analytics record a fraction of the influence, and nobody can yet size the fraction. Open your own page for a question you want to own and check whether any single sentence on it answers that question outright; a page optimized for keywords often holds no quotable answer at all. The cheapest measurement is asking ChatGPT and Claude your buyers’ questions yourself and reading what comes back.
The question you ask
“Which buyer questions do we want assistants citing us on, and which page answers each one?”