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 the questions they used to type into a search engine, and those assistants either quote a page, summarise several, or recommend an organisation by name. Your content needs to work for all three. This guide explains the terms, then gives you five practical tips for each.

Three acronyms, one goal

The short version: SEO gets you ranked, AEO gets you quoted, GEO gets you recommended.

A word of caution before we go further. These terms overlap heavily and there is no agreed definition that separates them. Google's own position, published in May 2026, is that optimising for AI search is still SEO. I think that is mostly right. SEO remains the foundation, because most AI tools still find content through search indexes. AEO and GEO are really about two things on top of it: how clearly your content is written, and how widely your organisation is trusted and talked about.

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 appear in AI Overviews either. Bing matters more than it used to, as several AI assistants draw on its index.
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 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, 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 dilute your site. 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 lift

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, your 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, how a legacy works: these are easier to read, and easier for machines to extract, when they are structured.
4. Keep one proper FAQ page for supporters. Tax receipts, where the money goes, how to cancel or change a gift, how you use personal data. Structured data (FAQ or Organisation markup) is optional, but it does no harm and helps with rich results.
5. Keep facts current, and date them. AI tools prefer content that looks reliable and fresh. Write "As of September 2026, we support 12 clinics", not "we currently support around a dozen clinics", and update figures when your annual report comes out.

5 GEO tips: give AI a reason to cite you

1. Say something only you can say. Google's guidance contrasts "commodity" content (generic tips anyone could write) with first-hand, expert content. Yes, I noticed the irony of making that point in a tips article. Your field data, programme results, case studies, and lessons learned are exactly what AI tools cannot invent, and that is your advantage.
2. Back your claims with numbers, sources, and quotes. The Princeton study that coined the term GEO found that adding statistics, citations, and quotations made content noticeably more visible in AI answers, while keyword stuffing did nothing useful. Cite your sources and name your experts.
3. Check that AI crawlers are not blocked by accident. Look at your robots.txt file and your hosting or security settings. Cloudflare, for example, has blocked AI crawlers by default on new domains since July 2025. Whether you allow them is a values decision: you may want AI search tools to find you, but not your content to be used to train models. Decide deliberately, not by accident.
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 like LinkedIn. Earn genuine mentions through partnerships and useful publications. Buying or faking mentions does not work 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 once a month, ask two or three AI assistants the questions your supporters would ask ("Which organisations support refugees in Madrid?") and note whether you appear, and whether what they say is accurate.

What you can safely ignore

According to Google, you do not need to create an llms.txt file, break your content into tiny "chunks", rewrite everything in a special style for AI, or add special markup to appear in its AI features. There is no harm in an llms.txt file if you want one, but it will not move the needle on Google. Treat anyone who sells you these as the secret to AI visibility with polite scepticism.

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.

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)
• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Princeton University and partners (KDD 2024)
• Wikipedia, Generative engine optimization
• Cloudflare, Content independence day: no AI crawl without compensation (July 2025)