SEO, AEO, and GEO: how to get your content found in the age of AI

A new acronym lands in my inbox every few months. This year it was two at once: AEO and GEO. If you have sat through a webinar recently, you may have been told that SEO is dead and that you urgently need a GEO strategy (and, conveniently, a GEO agency).

I built my first websites in 1996, two years before Google existed. I have seen a few acronyms come and go. Some of them mattered.

The picture is simple. People now ask AI assistants questions they used to type into a search engine. Those assistants may quote a page, summarise several sources, or recommend an organisation by name. Your content needs to be useful in all three situations. This guide explains the terms, then gives you five practical tips for each.

Three acronyms, one goal

In one sentence: SEO gets you ranked, AEO gets you quoted, GEO gets you recommended.

The slightly longer version:

• SEO helps people find your content
• AEO helps systems extract clear answers
• GEO describes the possibility of being cited or recommended in generative answers.

A word of caution before we go further. These terms overlap heavily and there is no agreed definition that separates them. They are useful shorthand, but they are not three separate technical systems.

Google's current guidance is that the same fundamentals still apply: create useful, reliable content for people, make it accessible to search engines, and follow ordinary SEO best practice. There is no special AI markup or separate technical optimisation required for Google's AI features. [1]

SEO remains the foundation, but many AI experiences also use other forms of web retrieval and external sources. The practical priorities are still the same: write clearly, provide evidence, make your content technically accessible, and build genuine trust around your organisation.

5 SEO tips: make sure you can be found

1. Check that search engines can see you at all. Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit a sitemap, and look at which pages are not indexed. A page that is not indexed cannot normally appear in Google's search-based AI features either. AI assistants outside Google may use additional sources, so check the wider picture too
2. One page, one purpose. Each important page needs a clear title, a meta description that says what the reader will get, one main heading, and a readable URL. "/our-work/water-access-kenya" beats "/page?id=4721"
3. Make it fast, accessible and mobile-friendly. Most of your supporters will read you on a phone, often on a slow connection. Compress images, remove plugins you no longer use, check accessibility, and test your key pages on a mid-range phone, not your laptop
4. Link your own content together. Link from your programme pages to the relevant resources, stories and donation page. Internal links help search engines understand what matters most on your site, and they help people keep reading
5. Clean up duplicates and dead ends. Old campaign pages, three versions of the same annual report and broken links all make your site harder to understand. Redirect what has moved, delete what no longer serves anyone, and keep one authoritative page per topic

5 AEO tips: make your answers easy to use

1. Answer the question in the first two sentences. Put the direct answer immediately under the heading, then add the detail. If someone asks "Can I claim Gift Aid on a sponsorship?", the first line should say yes or no
2. Use the questions people actually ask as headings. Your supporter care inbox, volunteer coordinators and the "People also ask" box in Google are full of real questions. Use their wording, not your internal jargon
3. Use lists and tables for steps and comparisons. How to set up a regular gift, what each membership level includes, and how a legacy works are easier to read and reuse when they are structured
4. Keep authoritative FAQ pages for supporters. Cover tax receipts, where the money goes, how to cancel or change a gift, and how you use personal data. Structured data can support eligibility for certain search features when it accurately reflects the visible content, but it is not required for Google's AI features. [2]
5. Keep facts current, and date them. Write "As of September 2026, we support 12 clinics", not "we currently support around a dozen clinics". Update figures when your annual report comes out, and make it clear when a figure or statement was last reviewed

5 GEO tips: give AI a reason to cite you

1. Say something only you can say. Google's guidance contrasts "commodity" content, which is generic and widely available, with original, expert content. Your field data, programme results, case studies and lessons learned are exactly what AI tools cannot reliably invent, and that is your advantage
2. Back your claims with numbers, sources and quotes. The Princeton study that introduced the term GEO found that statistics, citations and quotations improved visibility in its experimental setting, while keyword stuffing did not provide a useful benefit. Treat this as evidence for producing better content, not as a guaranteed formula for appearing in AI answers. [3]
3. Check that legitimate crawlers are not blocked by accident. Look at your robots.txt file and your hosting, CDN or security settings. Some providers and AI companies distinguish between crawlers used for search and crawlers used for model training. OpenAI, for example, provides separate controls for OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot. Decide deliberately which access you permit rather than relying on default settings. [4]
4. Be talked about elsewhere, for real. AI tools build their picture of your organisation from what others say about you: partner websites, sector reports, press coverage, directories and platforms such as LinkedIn. Earn genuine mentions through partnerships and useful publications. Buying or faking mentions does not build trust and can backfire
5. Describe yourself consistently, then test. Use the same name and the same one-sentence mission everywhere: your website, charity register entry, LinkedIn, directories and funding platforms. Then periodically ask several AI assistants questions your audiences would ask, and record whether you appear, whether the description is accurate, and which sources are cited

How to keep up without chasing every AI update

The AI landscape will continue to change. You do not need to follow every product announcement or rewrite your website every time a new acronym appears.

A practical approach is to:

• Assign one person responsibility for monitoring search and AI discoverability
• Review Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools at least quarterly
• Use a fixed set of eight to ten audience questions so that results can be compared over time
• Check whether your organisation is mentioned, cited, accurately described and linked to the right pages
• Review a small sample of priority pages for outdated facts, broken links, weak summaries and unclear ownership
• Check robots.txt, sitemaps, canonical URLs and major security or hosting changes
• Repeat the review after a major strategy change, programme launch, research publication or website migration

Bing matters because some AI assistants use its search service to find and cite fresh web content. Microsoft Copilot is the clearest example. Bing may have spent nearly two decades searching for the meaning of its life, but it now has a more practical job: helping AI systems decide which pages to show and cite. Bing Webmaster Tools also includes AI Performance reporting, which can show which URLs are cited in AI-generated answers and how citation activity changes over time. This is useful evidence, although citations should not be treated as a simple ranking score. [5] [6]

AI answer testing is also directional rather than definitive. Results vary by model, date, location, language, search history and the sources available to each system. The purpose is to identify factual errors, content gaps and visibility trends, not to claim a permanent position in an AI ranking.

What you can safely ignore

According to Google, you do not need to create special AI files, break your content into tiny "chunks", rewrite everything in a special style, or add special markup to appear in its AI features. There is also no special schema.org markup required for Google's generative AI search features. [1]

There is no need to prioritise llms.txt as a visibility tactic. If you choose to publish one for your own organisational reasons, do not confuse it with a recognised ranking requirement or a substitute for good website foundations . I created one just in case.

Be equally sceptical of third-party tools that promise guaranteed GEO rankings or claim to have access to private AI ranking metrics. No external tool has access to Google's internal ranking or AI systems. [1]

Why this matters for NGOs

For mission-driven organisations, this is not only about traffic. It is about being found by the people who need you, and about what AI says about you when you are not in the room.

• Supporters, volunteers and beneficiaries are already asking AI tools where to donate, volunteer or get help. If your organisation is absent or inaccurately described, it may be absent from the decision
• Fewer people may click through to your website from some AI-generated answers. Measure visibility, mentions, citations and meaningful actions, not only visits
• AI tools can get things wrong about you: outdated figures, a closed programme or a confused name. Clear, current and consistent information is your best protection
• Accessible HTML pages can help people and systems understand your work, while downloadable PDFs can remain useful for detailed reports, formal records and offline reading

Start with the foundations: a site search engines can read, answers written for real questions, and content only your organisation could have written. Most of what is sold as AEO or GEO is good SEO and good writing, done consistently.

Need help making your content visible?

This was meant as a quick guide. The right priorities depend on your audiences, your content, your website and your capacity. You already know that I help charities and not-for-profit organisations make their digital presence work harder for their mission.

And here comes the sales pitch

A short session can help you:

• Audit how visible your organisation is in search and in AI answers
• Identify the ten pages that matter most and fix them first
• Turn your programme knowledge into content that gets cited
• Set simple habits and measures your team can keep up

Sources

• Google Search Central, Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (May 2026)
• Google Search Central, AI features and your website
• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Princeton University and partners (KDD 2024)
• Bing Webmaster Blog, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (February 2026)
• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers