SEO, AEO and GEO in 2026: getting found by search engines and answer engines

Three acronyms walk into a marketing meeting. SEO, search engine optimisation, is the familiar one: ranking in Google and Bing. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is about being the answer in featured snippets, voice assistants and AI summaries. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is about being cited or recommended by tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot.

Here’s the honest headline: these overlap heavily. Most answer engines either run on a search index or browse the web live. A page that is crawlable, clear, trustworthy and well structured does well across all three. There’s no secret switch. Anyone selling you one is selling you the acronym.

Step one: be crawlable, everywhere

If a crawler can’t read your page, nothing else matters. Check the basics before you buy anything clever.

• Important content is in the HTML the server sends, not only injected by JavaScript later. Google can render JavaScript, but many AI crawlers fetch raw HTML and do far less rendering.
• Your robots.txt doesn’t block crawlers you actually want. Several AI companies publish their crawler names, so you can decide crawler by crawler.
• Your sitemap is current and lists the pages you care about.
• Each page has one clear title, one H1 and a meta description written for humans.

Step two: make your business an unambiguous entity

Search engines and language models both work better when they can tell exactly who you are. An ‘entity’ is just a thing with a stable identity: your company, your founder, your product. Help machines connect the dots.

• One clear About page that says who you are, where you are and what you do, in plain sentences.
• Consistent name, address and phone number across your site, Google Business Profile and directories.
• Dedicated pages for each service, each product and each key person, rather than one page that mentions everything.
• Links from your site to your official profiles, and from those profiles back to your site.

Step three: structured data, used properly

Structured data is a small block of JSON-LD in the page that describes what the page is about using the schema.org vocabulary. It helps search engines understand the page and can make it eligible for rich results. It does not guarantee them, and it’s not a ranking cheat. It must match what’s visible on the page.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Example Studio",
  "url": "https://www.example.com",
  "logo": "https://www.example.com/logo.png",
  "sameAs": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/example-studio"]
}
</script>

Start with Organization on the homepage, then the types that fit your pages: Service, Product, Article, BreadcrumbList, LocalBusiness. Validate them with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.

Step four: write answers, not essays

Answer engines lift passages, not whole pages. Content that states a clear answer near the top of a section is easier to quote accurately. That’s also simply good writing.

• Use real questions as headings, the ones customers ask your sales team.
• Answer in the first sentence or two under each heading, then add detail.
• Use specific nouns and numbers you can stand behind: prices, timelines, locations, versions.
• Keep FAQ sections for genuine questions. They help readers and answer engines, even though Google now shows FAQ rich results only for a narrow set of authoritative sites.

Step five: earn citations

Answer engines lean on sources that other sources trust. That’s the old SEO lesson about links, wearing a new jacket. Get mentioned in places that matter in your industry: trade publications, credible directories, partner sites, conference pages, podcasts. Publish something original, such as a guide, a dataset you collected yourself or a clear explanation nobody else has written, so there’s a reason to cite you.

Reviews matter too, on Google and on the platforms your buyers use. Real reviews, never bought ones.

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a Markdown file at the root of your site that summarises your key pages for language models. It’s cheap to add and harmless. It is also, at the time of writing, a proposal, not a standard that major search or AI companies have committed to using. Add one if you like. Don’t expect it to move anything on its own, and be wary of anyone who says it will.

Step six: speed still counts

Page experience, including Core Web Vitals, is part of how Google evaluates pages. Fast pages also get crawled more efficiently and keep the visitors that do arrive. A slow site leaks value at every step, whatever engine sent the traffic.

How to measure it

Traditional SEO has good tools: Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools show impressions, clicks and queries. Measuring visibility inside AI answers is less mature. Practical options today:

• Check referral traffic from AI tools in your analytics. Several send identifiable referrers.
• Keep a fixed list of questions your buyers ask and check monthly whether AI tools mention or link to you. Record the results; don’t rely on memory.
• Ask new leads how they found you, and include ‘an AI assistant’ as an option.

The verdict

SEO isn’t dead and GEO isn’t magic. The work that gets you found in 2026 is the work that always did: be readable by machines, be clear about who you are, answer real questions well, earn mentions from credible places, and load fast. The engines changed their front-end. They didn’t change what they’re looking for.