The AI-search
field notes.

Generative Engine Optimization — GEO — is the work of getting your brand named inside the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude write. There's no blue link to click and no ranking to climb. Either the model pulls your sentence into its reply, or it doesn't.

It doesn't read your site the way Google's crawler does. It reasons over an entity — a thing it already half-understands — and reaches for sources that confirm what it suspects. Your job is to be the clearest, most quotable confirmation it can find.

Seven moves do most of the work:

• Nail the entity. One canonical name, one crisp "we are the X that does Y" sentence, repeated identically across your site, your About page and every profile. Models hate ambiguity; reward clarity.
• Answer the question first. Lead each page with a 40–60 word direct answer, then expand. That opening block is what gets lifted verbatim.
• Cover the corpus. Be present where models graze — Wikipedia-grade references, industry round-ups, comparison pages, and yes, Reddit threads that LLMs read constantly.
• Earn third-party mentions. A model trusts what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. This is where digital PR and earned links pay off twice.
• Structure for extraction. Real headings, short paragraphs, tables, FAQ schema. Make the sentence easy to pluck whole.
• Add specificity. Numbers, dates, named methods. "Faster" gets ignored; "ships in 11 days, median" gets quoted.
• Measure the citations. Track which prompts surface you, in which engines, with which wording — then feed the gaps back into the corpus.

The honest part: this is slow, compounding work, not a switch. AI does the rote half — prompt-testing across engines, scraping who currently gets cited, drafting the entity copy. A human owns the judgment about what's true, what's quotable, and what's worth being known for. Want the full citation strategy? See our GEO service or grab a free AI visibility audit.

Google now answers most questions itself, at the top of the page, before a single organic result. That's an AI Overview — and it's why a chunk of the searches you used to win now end zero-click. The traffic didn't vanish. The summary swallowed it.

You can't opt out, so the play is to become the source Google quotes inside the box. When you're cited there, you keep the visibility — often the brand mention and the click from people who want the detail.

What we've watched the Overview reliably reward:

• Passage-level answers. Google lifts a passage, not a page. A tight, self-contained paragraph that fully answers one question is far more liftable than a 2,000-word essay.
• Question-shaped headings. Mirror the real query as an H2, answer it immediately underneath. This overlaps heavily with Answer Engine Optimization.
• Trust signals. Named authors, citations, recent dates, and a real organisation behind the page. Overviews skew toward sources they can vouch for.
• Clean structure and schema. FAQ markup, How-To markup, fast pages — the technical plumbing that lets Google parse you without guessing.
• Depth the summary can't replace. If the Overview answers the whole question, no one clicks. Win by being the obvious next step — calculators, comparisons, originals worth the visit.

Measure it differently, too: stop staring at raw clicks alone and start tracking Overview appearances, branded search lift, and assisted conversions. AI does the rote half — monitoring which queries trigger an Overview and who gets cited. A human decides which battles are worth the passage. The full method is on our AIO page; it sits inside our wider search visibility pillar.

Four acronyms get used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Each one optimises for a different machine reading your site. Get them straight and you'll stop wasting effort on the wrong layer.

• SEO — Search Engine Optimization. The original: rank in Google's blue links via technical health, content and authority. Still the foundation — none of the rest works on a broken site. Our SEO service →
• AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Winning the direct answer — featured snippets, voice results, the "position zero" box — with structured, question-and-answer content. Our AEO service →
• AIO — AI Overviews Optimization. Specifically about Google's AI-generated summary at the top of results: being the source it quotes. Our AIO service →
• GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Getting cited inside standalone AI chat — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude — where there's no results page at all. Our GEO service →

Where they overlap: clean structure, real expertise and crisp question-first answers help all four. Where they diverge: SEO chases rankings, AEO chases the snippet, AIO chases Google's summary box, GEO chases a mention in a chatbot's reply.

Which to fix first? In order: SEO (the foundation), then AEO and AIO together (same on-page muscles), then GEO (the longest game, the biggest moat). You don't pick one — you sequence them. That sequencing is exactly what our Search & AI Visibility pillar runs end to end. Bookmark the glossary for the rest of the alphabet soup.

Reddit is where buyers go to hear from other buyers, not from brands — which is exactly why it's the highest-trust, highest-risk channel you have. It's also read constantly by Google and by LLMs, so a good Reddit presence quietly feeds both your AI Overview and your GEO footprint. One spammy post, though, and a moderator removes you for good.

The rule that keeps you alive: automate the listening, never automate the talking. Bots that post draw bans. Bots that monitor draw opportunities.

• Automate discovery. Alerts on your brand, competitors, and the problems you solve, across the subreddits that matter. A human reads every hit and decides whether to engage.
• Read each subreddit's rules first. Promotion limits, self-promo ratios, flair requirements — they differ wildly. Breaking them once is enough.
• Earn before you mention. Be genuinely useful in a dozen threads before your product ever comes up — and when it does, disclose the affiliation plainly.
• Respect the 9-to-1 ratio. Roughly nine helpful, brand-free contributions for every one that mentions you. Redditors and mods both count.
• Use AMAs and launches the official way. Coordinate with mods, post in the right place, and never buy upvotes — vote manipulation is the fastest route to a sitewide ban.

So the AI does the rote half — the round-the-clock monitoring, sentiment tagging, and surfacing of threads worth a reply. A human writes every word that gets posted, because authenticity is the entire point and it can't be faked at scale. Done right, the ban count stays at zero. Want it run for you, compliantly? See Reddit & Community, part of our Growth & Demand pillar.