SEO, AEO and GEO: how to rank in Google and ChatGPT search

Search used to mean one thing: ten blue links on Google. Today, the same question might be answered by a Google result, a featured snippet, a voice assistant or an AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. Each of those surfaces chooses what to show in a slightly different way. That is where the three acronyms come from.

The three, in one line each

Term	Stands for	The goal
SEO	Search engine optimisation	Rank your pages in search results
AEO	Answer engine optimisation	Be the direct answer a search engine lifts and shows
GEO	Generative engine optimisation	Be understood, trusted and cited by AI assistants

They are not three separate projects. They are layers on the same foundation, and the work overlaps heavily.

SEO vs GEO vs AEO: what is actually different

The difference is where the answer appears and who writes it. With SEO, Google ranks your page and the searcher clicks through to read it. With AEO, the search engine lifts a passage from your page and shows it as the answer, often with a link. With GEO, an AI model writes its own answer and may name or cite you as a source, or may not link at all.

So SEO is judged on rankings and clicks, AEO on whether your wording is chosen as the answer, and GEO on whether AI assistants mention your business, describe it correctly and cite your pages. GEO builds on SEO: AI search features in Google and Bing draw on the same indexes, so a page that cannot rank rarely gets cited.

SEO: still the foundation

If search engines cannot crawl, render and understand your site, nothing else matters. Good SEO in 2026 still comes down to a few unglamorous things:

• Crawlable pages. Content should be in the HTML that the server sends, not only drawn by JavaScript after the page loads.
• One clear topic per page, with a single descriptive H1 and headings that outline the page.
• Fast, stable pages on a phone. Google measures Core Web Vitals: how quickly the main content appears (LCP), how stable the layout is (CLS) and how quickly the page responds to taps (INP).
• Clean URLs and redirects. When you rebuild a site, map every old URL to its closest new page with a 301 redirect.
• Content that deserves to rank: written for a real person with a real question, by someone who knows the subject.

AEO: answer first, then explain

Answer engines look for a short, self-contained passage that answers a question directly. You can make that easy for them:

1. Lead with the answer. Open the page or section with a 40 to 60 word answer, then add the detail.
2. Use the question as a heading where it is natural, for example "How long does a website take?"
3. Add FAQ sections with the questions customers actually ask you, written in plain language. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, so do not expect dropdowns in the results, but clear question-and-answer passages are still exactly what answer engines and AI assistants lift.
4. Mark it up. Organization, Service, Product, Article and Breadcrumb structured data tell search engines what each page is about. Keep it identical to the visible text.

A useful test: read the first paragraph of any page out loud. If it would make sense as a voice assistant's reply, you are on the right track.

GEO: make your business easy for AI to describe

AI assistants build their answers from what they can find and trust about you across the web. You cannot control what they say, but you can make the accurate version easy to find:

• Consistent entity facts. Your business name, what you do, where you are and how to contact you should match on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social profiles and the directories you appear in.
• Organisation schema on your site, including sameAs links to your official profiles.
• Quotable statements. Clear, factual sentences such as "Ceylond is a digital marketing, AI automation and software agency based in Sri Lanka" are easier to cite than clever slogans.
• Mentions beyond your own site. AI assistants trust what independent sources say about you: directory profiles such as Clutch, genuine reviews, YouTube videos, LinkedIn posts and articles that name your business next to what it does. In Ahrefs' studies of tens of thousands of brands, web mentions tracked AI visibility far more closely than backlinks did.
• An llms.txt file, with low expectations. A short plain-text summary at the root of your site that points AI tools to your key pages. It is cheap to add, but log studies in 2026 found most llms.txt files get no requests at all, and Google says it does not use them. Treat it as a tidy extra, not a strategy.
• Allow the crawlers you want. Check that your robots.txt does not accidentally block the search and AI crawlers you would like to be found by.

How to rank in ChatGPT search

There is no ranking setting inside ChatGPT, but you can make it much more likely to find and recommend you:

1. Get indexed in Bing. ChatGPT search leans heavily on Bing's index. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap and switch on IndexNow (Cloudflare's Crawler Hints does this for you). Bing's AI Performance report then shows which of your pages Copilot cites.
2. Answer the question on the page. Assistants quote pages that state a fact or a number plainly. A pricing page with real "from" prices gets quoted; a page that says "contact us for a quote" does not.
3. Say who you are in one sentence, with your name and your category together, and repeat that exact sentence on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory.
4. Earn independent mentions. Reviews on directories, a profile on the partner pages of tools you use, a YouTube walkthrough and genuine answers on forums all give the model a second source that agrees with your site.
5. Keep it fresh. Pages updated within the last few months are cited far more often than stale ones. Put a visible "last updated" date on pages that change.

Then test it. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Mode the same handful of questions about your category, logged out, and record whether you are mentioned and whether the facts are right.

What not to do

On 15 May 2026 Google updated its spam policies to cover AI Overviews and AI Mode, and "attempting to manipulate generative AI responses" is now spam. Hidden text telling AI to recommend you, pages served only to AI crawlers, mass-produced AI articles, fake reviews and "best agencies" lists that rank yourself first all risk your visibility in both search and AI answers. The slow, honest version is the only one that lasts.

What to do this month

If you only have time for a few things, do these in order:

1. Check your site in Google Search Console for indexing problems.
2. Rewrite the opening paragraph of your five most important pages so each one answers its main question directly.
3. Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap.
4. Make your business details and one-line description identical everywhere they appear online.
5. Ask a few AI assistants about your business and your category, and note what they get wrong. Those gaps are your content plan.

Where Ceylond fits

We do this work for small businesses in Australia, the UK, the UAE and Sri Lanka, and for agencies who resell it, from technical fixes to answer-first content and structured data. See our SEO services for Google and AI search and what SEO costs with us, or send us a brief and we will tell you where your biggest gaps are.