AEO / GEO
What is generative engine optimization?
Search used to send you a visitor. Increasingly it sends the visitor an answer, and the only question that matters is whether your page is the one it quotes.
GEO and AEO (answer engine optimization) describe the same shift with slightly different emphasis. Both accept that a growing share of queries now end in a synthesised answer, and that appearing inside that answer is a different problem from ranking tenth on a page nobody scrolls.
What changes mechanically
A generative system does not rank your page. It retrieves passages, judges whether they support the answer it is composing, and cites the ones it uses. That shifts the unit of optimisation from the page to the passage. A page that buries its answer under four paragraphs of context is retrievable but not quotable.
What tends to get cited
- A direct answer in the first forty to sixty words, stated as a claim rather than a promise to explain later.
- Specifics that a model cannot fabricate safely: numbers, dates, named entities, jurisdictions, versions.
- Structure that survives extraction: real headings, short paragraphs, lists where a list is the honest shape of the content.
- Schema markup, particularly FAQ and Article, which makes the question-answer pairing machine-legible.
- Corroboration. Being one of several independent sources saying the same thing matters more than being the loudest single one.
What does not work
Keyword density does nothing here. Neither does length for its own sake, and a 3,000 word page that answers the question in one sentence somewhere in the middle will lose to a 600 word page that answers it first. Programmatically generated near-duplicate pages are actively harmful, because they get filtered as scaled content before retrieval is even considered.
Measuring it
The honest answer is that measurement is immature. Impressions and clicks in Search Console still capture the AI Overviews surface imperfectly, and the chat interfaces expose almost nothing. Practical proxies: track referral traffic from the AI assistants that do send it, run your key questions through each system on a schedule and record whether you are cited, and watch for the pattern where impressions rise while clicks fall, which usually means you are being read without being visited.
Where it fits
GEO does not replace SEO. Retrieval still depends on being crawled, indexed and considered credible, which is ordinary technical and editorial work. GEO is the layer on top that decides whether, once retrieved, your passage is the one that ends up in the answer. Digiton runs this as a standing practice, and the approach is set out under AI SEO in Lisbon.
Frequently asked questions
What is generative engine optimization?
It is the practice of making a page likely to be retrieved and cited by AI answer systems such as AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini. Rather than competing for a click-through position in a list of links, GEO optimises for being quoted inside the generated answer itself.
Is GEO different from SEO?
It sits on top of SEO rather than replacing it. Retrieval still depends on being crawled, indexed and treated as credible, which is ordinary technical and editorial work. GEO governs whether, once your page is retrieved, the specific passage is good enough to end up in the answer.
How do you measure generative engine optimization?
Measurement is immature and worth being honest about. Useful proxies are referral traffic from the assistants that send it, running your key questions through each system on a schedule and recording citations, and watching for rising impressions alongside falling clicks, which suggests being read without being visited.
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