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Guide

AI Search Practical Guide: GEO & AEO

All brands want to improve their presence in AI search results. Who doesn’t want ChatGPT to recommend their brand when people ask AI? Here we provide a practical guide that you can follow to improve your visibility in AI responses.

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AI Search vs Web Search: GEO vs AEO vs SEO

Search Engine Optimization

People used to search for things in search engines like Google or Bing. Once you type in your question, it will provide you with a list of Web pages (Search Results Pages or SERPs for short). Often, people look at the title, and sometimes the description. People mostly visit the first relevant website they encounter.

It isn't surprising that more visits correlate with more sales. When more prospects find your products, they are more likely to buy from you than, say, your competitors. Companies knew this, and that is why they started optimizing their websites to show high in Google SERPs. This optimization is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Answer Engine Optimization

But today, when you visit Google and type in your question, you will see an AI-generated answer above Google Search Results. These are called AI Overviews. If you ask about the best healthy food restaurants in your area, the AI-generated answer will include several healthy restaurants.

Figure 1: Example of brand mention (buzzsense) in AI Overview

Brands that appear in AI search results are likely to have more sales than their competitors who are not showing in these AI-generated answers. History repeats itself, and companies are now trying to optimize their online presence to appear in those Answers, hence AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).

Generative Engine Optimization

AEO differs from GEO in that AEO doesn't take into account the brand's website. In fact, we found cases of brands with no websites that still have high visibility in AI Answers. AEO is about improving the presence of the brand in AI answers where people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI chatbots. It does not mean that having a good website won't help with AEO.

Figure 2: Example of Web page citation in AI Overview

On the other hand, GEO focuses on the brand’s website. Mainly, how often do ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, ..., cite the brand's website?

The best way to understand how AI cites your website is to learn about query fan-out. It is how AI takes a user query, converts it into several relevant queries, and performs a Web search, which is sometimes referred to as grounding.

AI Search Strategy

The strategy to optimize for showing in AI search results is a combination of AEO, GEO, and SEO.

The practical way to optimize for AI Search is as follows:

  1. Collect AI Search analytics (e.g., using buzzsense.ai).
  2. Analyze the results (e.g., sources that are citing your competitors).
  3. Make your website cited by AI.
  4. Have your brand mentioned in AI.
  5. Rank your website high for search engines.
  6. Iterate and Optimize.

Step 1: Data Collection. Start Measuring

You might’ve heard the saying: "You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure."

Before you put a strategy in place to appear in ChatGPT, you need to measure your visibility "score" in ChatGPT, so you can work to improve it later. That lets you compare different techniques, and you can apply the one that optimizes your presence in AI Search the most.

The way to start collecting the data is by going into one of the AI Search Analytics tools (e.g., BuzzSense) and put your queries there.

One might wonder what queries I should insert into the AI Search Analytics tool. Think about what your prospective clients might look for and what they might ask the AI. It should be something related to the problem you solve. For example, if you are a dentist specialized in braces, then you want to anticipate what your future patients might type in ChatGPT (e.g., "Best dentist for braces in New York" or "Top Invisalign providers in Dubai"). You can also ask your patients who are visiting your clinic or conduct market research.

You can also type the questions in different languages depending on your location and the prospects you are targeting. WorkDuo shows a starter set of queries to help you get started.

Some tools also permit adding competitors, so it is better to fill in the competitors and any required data (e.g., their names, websites, ...). This data varies depending on the tool being used.

Within a few days, we will have your baseline and enough data to get you started.

Step 2: Data Analysis. Study Competitors

After waiting a few days, we can now look at the data gathered by the AI Search Analytics tool.

Here are the main things to look at:

  1. Leaderboard. Look at the top competitors in the leaderboard. This provides an overall sense of your brand in comparison to your competitors.
  2. Sources. Look at the most commonly cited Web pages. This helps determine which Websites AI prefers.
  3. Content Type. Look at the kinds of sources being cited. Are they listicles, guides, blogs, social media, etc.
  4. Model. Break down your visibility and the sources for the different language models. It is not uncommon to see some brands topping one AI model while getting ignored by other models.
  5. Niche. Sometimes your brand has a high visibility in one niche while being at the bottom of the leaderboard in other niches.
  6. Language. If your target customers speak different languages, you might want to see in which language you are doing well and in which you need to improve.

Side note: It is common to add newly discovered competitors to the tool. If so, wait a few more days and focus on the data collected after adding the competitors, so all competitors are considered equally.

Step 3: GEO Strategy. Get Started

Some might ask why we should start with GEO, while others are suggesting AEO. The main reason is to have a page to link back to when having content in other places (a backlink). Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your website. This can increase your chances of ranking high in Google search by boosting your website's authority.

Generative Engine Optimization can be broken down into the following:

  1. Query Design. This is the user query they type into ChatGPT asking for an answer (see step 2). Choosing the principal query (sometimes called keywords) is crucial. If you are selling shoes, your query should neither be about food nor running (unless your strategy is about running content; in that case, you should also have another query about shoes). It might be helpful to look at Query Intent as well.
  2. Query fan-out. Whenever a user writes a question for the AI, it takes it and generates several relevant questions. The important step here is to gather these queries.
  3. Optimizing for each Query. In other words, perform SEO for each of those generated queries. Optimize your Web pages to rank high in Google and Bing search for each query

To increase your chances of ranking high in Google's SERP, have valuable, interesting content, as recommended by Google. The next step is about having the brand recommended by AI.

Step 4: AEO Strategy. Get Involved

AEO aims to improve the presence of the brand in AI Search results. So when people ask about the best product or company in YOUR NICHE, AI would suggest your brand. You can see an example of AI answer here.

The important question is how to optimize your brand presence in AI responses? Make the content Concise, Relevant, Cover Information Gap, and Fresh.

Let us expand on this. To optimize your brand presence to show in AI Answers (AEO) make the content:

  1. Concise. Declarative and to the point content is more likely to be cited. Sometimes entity density is measured as well. Humans and AI both like to get to the answer directly without navigating the fluf.
  2. Relevant. Answer user questions in the text as early as possible before going into the details and make it clear in the heading e.g., "does X work", "What is X", etc.
  3. Cover Information Gap. Valuable content that fill in information gaps that the user have are more likely to be cited. This can be either to the temporal content, unique view points, or missing unavailable information not currently covered
  4. Fresh. The majority of AI cited content were published in the past 12 months. Update your content every few months to make them fresh and relevant for AI.

In addition to the previous steps, you can reach out to other publications and ask to be mentioned. Getting cited in posts related to your products or services isn't easy, so be patient and keep posting helpful content while mentioning your brand.

Step 5: SEO Strategy. Rank High

Having this at the bottom of the list doesn't make it less important; it is actually one of the most important steps. To rank high in search engines like Google and Bing, you can follow these steps:

  1. Track Ranking. Set up Google Analytics and Google Search Console to measure your performance on Google.
  2. Research Keywords. Now you have your niches and keywords. It is time to do keyword research and choose the keywords to target on your Web page.
  3. Content Planning. Decide the kind of article you want to write (e.g., blog, case study) and the kind of information you would like the Web page to have. Don’t forget to add the keywords you chose in the previous step.
  4. Add Headings. We are not talking only about formatting (e.g., having only one H1), but also about the kind of text to include in them (e.g., answering a user question). Again, use the chosen keywords if possible.
  5. Add Metadata. Meta descriptions are displayed in Google search results. You can follow Google’s guidelines about writing meta descriptions(https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/snippet).
  6. Add Schema. This is also called adding structured data markup. It describes the page's content and influences how Google displays its content.
  7. Add Sitemap and Robots. The file sitemap.xml provides information about the website pages and content, while robots.txt guides crawlers on what to crawl and what to ignore. Submit sitemap.xml to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools and set up robots.txt properly. These are part of what is called Technical SEO.
  8. Get relevant backlinks. This is to have others link to your content. This is not easy, but with good content, you can increase your chances of getting cited.
  9. Revise and Repeat. Review the results in Google Analytics and Google Search Console, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Go back to step 2, optimize, and repeat. You can also start addressing new keywords at this point.

Step 6: Iterate & Optimize

The topic of SEO is vast. Once you finish with these fundamentals, you can explore other kinds of SEO. Use Google Search Analytics and Bing Webmaster Tools and see how your performance is improving.

Further, you can focus on optimizing each niche. With tools like buzzsense.ai, you can define different niches/categories to optimize for one by one. Depending on your goal, you might focus on the niche with the highest volume or the one with the highest profit margin. It all depends on your business plan.

If you need help with your AI Search Optimization, whether it is AEO, GEO, or SEO, we are happy to help. Visit www.buzzsense.ai