For a decade the question was "where do you rank on Google?" The new question is: "does ChatGPT recommend you?" A growing share of users now put their searches to an AI — ChatGPT, Gemini, Google's AI Overviews — and get a single answer instead of ten blue links. If you are not in that answer, the customer never sees you at all. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) are the keys to this new door. We cover both in one guide because in practice they work interlocked.
What Is the Difference Between GEO and AEO?
AEO means presenting the answer to a question clearly to answer engines (Google's featured snippets, voice assistants, AI summaries): question-and-answer structure, short crisp definitions, FAQ schema. GEO means getting generative AIs (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) to pick your content as a source: verifiable claims, a high density of numbers and references, machine-readable structure. AEO is being inside the answer; GEO is being the answer's source.
What Does an AI Pick as a Source?
- Structured data (schema.org): content should be explained to the machine through structure, not sentences — Organization, Service, FAQPage and Article markup.
- llms.txt: a file that gives AI bots a summary of the site and its most important pages. There is a live example on this site: yazilimpark.com/llms.txt.
- Definition-first writing: the answer to the question belongs in the first sentence, not at the end of the paragraph; detail comes after.
- Verifiability: empty claims like "we are the industry leader" get filtered out; checkable numbers like "we took mobile speed from 81 to 99" get chosen.
- Bot access: none of this matters if robots.txt accidentally blocks AI crawlers — that is check number one.
How We Apply It on Our Own Site
None of this stays theoretical here: this site's llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, its machine-readable JSON endpoint (ai-index), the schema layer on every page, and the AI directives that route price questions to the calculator are all live. We build the same architecture into client projects as well.
Why Now?
Because your competitors are not here yet. In classic SEO you race against a decade of accumulated competition; in AI visibility the field is still largely empty. The early mover becomes the company the AIs "know" — and the latecomer's job only gets harder. For scope and pricing: the "AI Search Visibility (GEO/AEO)" item inside our SEO service is priced in the calculator.
What Is GEO? What Is AEO? Short Definitions
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): the work of getting generative AIs such as ChatGPT and Gemini to select your site as a source when they compose an answer. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): the work of being inside the answer on "single-answer" systems such as Google's featured snippets, voice assistants and AI summaries. The short distinction: AEO is being inside the answer, GEO is being the source of the answer — and both are built on top of a classic SEO foundation.
Do Google's AI Overviews Reduce Traffic?
Partly, yes — if the user finds the answer in the overview, they may never click through, and industry data confirms the click loss on informational searches. But the other side of the coin matters more: the sites that are the source of the overview both receive links from it and move into the position of "the source the AI trusts". The loser is ordinary content that never makes it into the overview; the winner is the structured content the overview feeds on. Your strategy should be built accordingly: instead of mourning the lost clicks, take the source seat.
Classic SEO exists so that searchers find you; GEO and AEO exist so that the AI knows you and recommends you. They are not rivals but sequential — and neither works without the technical base.
