AEO & GEO Agencies: Get Cited in ChatGPT and AI Search

What AEO and GEO actually mean

AEO — answer engine optimisation — is the practice of making a brand easy for an AI assistant to retrieve, quote and attribute. GEO — generative engine optimisation — is the same discipline named after the generative models doing the quoting. Agencies use the two terms interchangeably, and the deliverables are the same.

The shift matters because the click never happens. When someone asks an assistant which CRM suits a 40-person sales team, it answers in prose and names two or three vendors. If your brand is not among the sources the model retrieves, you are not in the consideration set — regardless of where you rank on page one of Google.

What an AEO engagement includes

• Answer-gap research. Running the prompts your buyers actually type into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, then recording which brands get named and which sources get cited.
• Entity and knowledge-graph work. Consistent naming, resolvable company, product and founder entities, Wikidata presence, and schema.org markup (Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article) so a retriever can work out who you are.
• Content restructuring. Rewriting pages so each answers one specific question in the first hundred words, with the claim, the number and the date in extractable form instead of buried in narrative.
• Source placement. Getting your data onto the pages models retrieve most — comparison articles, industry directories, review platforms, community threads and trade press.
• Crawler policy. Deciding what GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended may read, and making robots.txt, llms.txt and the server rules agree with that decision.
• Citation monitoring. Tracking share of voice across assistants over time, because positions here move weekly and none of it appears in Search Console.

How AEO differs from SEO

SEO optimises for a ranked list of ten links. AEO optimises for a single synthesised answer that cites three to five sources. The underlying factors overlap — crawlability, authority, freshness — but the unit of success is different: not a position, but whether a sentence about you survives into the model's output.

Two practical consequences follow. Keyword volume matters less than question coverage, because long, specific prompts are where assistants pull vendor names from. And off-site sources matter more than in classic SEO, because retrieval-augmented models quote third-party pages about you far more often than your own homepage.

None of this replaces SEO. AI Overviews draw heavily on pages that already rank organically, so an agency that runs AEO as a silo separate from your organic programme will underperform one that runs both together.

How to choose an AEO agency

• Ask for citation data, not traffic data. A credible agency shows before-and-after share of voice for named prompts in named assistants.
• Check they measure more than ChatGPT. Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and AI Overviews retrieve differently, and a brand can be strong in one and invisible in another.
• Ask how they handle attribution. AI referral traffic arrives largely unlabelled, so find out what they do about measurement before you sign.
• Prefer teams with real SEO history. AEO is a young label; the technical and editorial skills underneath it are not.
• Confirm the reporting cadence. Model and index updates reset positions, which makes quarterly reporting too slow to act on.

What AEO costs

Most AEO retainers sit in the same band as mid-market SEO: roughly $2,000–$8,000 per month for an ongoing programme, with one-off audits from $3,000 to $15,000 depending on how many prompts and markets are in scope. Agencies in Eastern Europe, India and Latin America quote materially lower; US and UK agencies with published research quote higher.

Expect three to six months before citation share moves. The lag comes from crawl and index cycles on the third-party sources an assistant retrieves, not from the work itself.