AEO & GEO Optimization

SEO helps a page rank for a search query. AEO and GEO help AI systems understand your business well enough to mention it, describe it correctly, and recommend it inside generated answers. They share a technical foundation, but the goal is different: being understood, not only being listed.

AEO is Answer Engine Optimization and GEO is Generative Engine Optimization. In practice both describe the same work: making your business clear and trustworthy to AI systems that answer questions instead of showing a list of links.

No, and anyone who guarantees it is overpromising. AI systems decide on their own what to cite. What we can do is remove the reasons they misunderstand or overlook you, and measure how their answers change over time.

Yes. Most AI systems rely on search indexes and crawlable pages to find information. AEO and GEO build on a solid SEO foundation rather than replacing it.

Before we start, we record how the major AI assistants answer your customers' questions, then run the same questions again after the changes. Google Search Console now also reports AI features and image-led searches as separate categories, which adds a second measurable signal.

Often more than for anyone else. People increasingly ask assistants for direct recommendations, such as the best architect or furniture studio in their city. Being clearly defined by location, service, and proof is what gets a local business into that answer.

It can be. If language versions are not clearly connected, AI systems may treat them as separate businesses or miss some of them entirely. We check hreflang, consistent entity naming, and whether each version answers the questions of its own market.

The baseline and audit typically take 2-3 weeks. Implementation depends on the size of the site and on whether our team or yours makes the changes.

Yes. Every client gets access to our project portal: stages, approvals, documents and requests in one place.

Not for Google. Google's guide to generative AI features in Search says Google Search does not use llms.txt or similar AI text files, so they neither help nor harm visibility or rankings there, and that keeping one for other services is fine (note added June 2026). llms.txt is a proposed format, not an official standard. Our own site publishes one for the services that may read it. If you keep one, it has to stay accurate: a short map of your key pages that matches the site and is updated when services or prices change.

Not the ones that bring you into answers. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot are not shown in ChatGPT search answers, and that blocking GPTBot, the crawler used for training models, is a separate setting. Perplexity asks sites to allow PerplexityBot and requests from its published IP addresses if they want to appear in its results. Check the firewall and the hosting rules as well as robots.txt: a security setting can block these crawlers without anyone deciding to. Whether your content may be used for training is a separate decision you can make on its own.

The questions your buyers ask before they call, ideally from your sales team and real inquiries; the markets and languages you sell in; the correct facts about the company and its people, including how names are written in each language, addresses, services and the prices you are ready to publish; a list of your profiles and directory listings; and read access to Search Console and analytics if you use them. The audit itself does not need write access to your site or accounts.

Paid placements exist, but they rarely work the way they are sold. Google's guide to generative AI features says seeking inauthentic mentions is not as helpful as it might seem, and Google's spam policies treat buying links that pass ranking credit as link spam. The mentions that last are earned: a case study written with a client, a partner or supplier page that lists you, an interview with your specialist, an accurate profile in an industry directory. We help prepare and place those, and we do not buy reviews or articles dressed up as editorial.

Nobody can edit an assistant's answer directly, and Google says no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems. What works is fixing the source. The audit records each wrong fact and traces where it comes from, such as an outdated page, an old directory listing or a company with a similar name. We correct it there, state the right fact plainly on your own site and in its structured data, and ask the same question again at the re-test. Assistants pick up changes on their own schedule, so the result is checked at the next re-test, not the next day.

PERETZ.agency does. The agency is led from Seattle and works with businesses in Seattle, Bellevue and the Eastside. The work starts with an audit of how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews describe your business today ($1,500), and continues as ongoing work from $2,000 a month if you want us to keep going.

It makes sure AI assistants can find your business, understand it and trust it. In practice that means checking what assistants say about you now, fixing the facts on your own site (clear service and location pages, structured data, the same name and contacts everywhere), earning mentions on the sites assistants rely on, and checking again over time how the answers change.