These days, more and more businesses are looking to rank in AEO and GEO; and this is because earlier to get in the radar of their clients they must have good SEO ranking otherwise they will be invisible but this is now changing. To those who do not know AEO and GEO they are nothing but SEO of AI engines.
The reason behind this shift from SEO to AEO and GEO; people’s behaviour. Along with Google search they are also using chat agents such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity etc to get the information they are looking for,
This means it has become very important for businesses to get recommended by these AI chatbots. For example, if our client asks ChatGPT or Gemini, “Which is the best digital marketing agency in New Delhi?” then we would definitely want LLMs or AI Chatbot to recommend our name, Inklik, as one of the best digital marketing agencies in New Delhi.
Before we try to understand how you can get ranked in AU and GO, let’s just take a quick minute to understand what actually AU is and what GO is.
What Is AEO
It is an optimization technique that helps your brand appear in Google’s answers when people search for your products or services. To demonstrate how it works, we searched for “best red T-shirt,” and Uniqlo appeared in the results.
Google Search | AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)
What Is GEO
It is an optimization technique that helps your brand appear in AI-generated answers when people search for your product or service. To show it working, we asked ChatGPT, “What’s the best red T-shirt?” and Uniqlo was recommended.
ChatGPT | GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
What Happens If Your Business Fails to Rank in AEO or GEO?
If your brand or service doesn’t rank in AEO or GEO, then it simply means your brand is invisible or unknown to them, and your customers are going to go to one of your competitors. As the saying goes, “Jo Dikhta Hai, Woh Bikta Hai.” If your brand does not appear when your customer asks on Google or ChatGPT, then to your customer, your brand does not even exist, and no matter how good your product or service is, you do not get the chance to provide it to your customer.
AEO and GEO Ranking Related Data
Until recently, there were no set rules for what needed to be done to start ranking in AEO and GEO because even the companies that invented these AI answering tools were still figuring out how they worked and how they would impact businesses.
A lot of gurus on the internet were giving advice to get ranked in AEO and GEO even though there was nothing you could have done to make the AEO or GEO ranking improve. In fact, they were selling their own services or tools which would tell you how you should rank in AEO and GEO, even though there was no data around what exactly people are searching on these chat agents, what type of rankings are coming on. There was nothing about that, but these people were just going and selling their services and tools, and people were paying them lots of money for virtually nothing.
However, now tools like Google Search Console have actually started showing this data. If you add your website to Google Search Console, there is a part where you can see the AI agent queries, for which agent queries your website is ranking. That’s the only legit data, I assume.
There are tools like Ahrefs also which show this data. But other than that, any other tool, I would assume that they don’t have any source for this data, and they are just making things up.
How to Improve Your AEO and GEO Rankings
For good online ranking, SEO is really important, and you may be surprised that SEO provides the strong foundation on which AEO and GEO rankings are decided.
Now, coming back to the original question: how do you actually start ranking in AEO and GEO? This is something I have thought about for a very long time.
Till recently, there was some evidence that if a website is doing well on Reddit and YouTube, then probably these chat agents are recommending your website more. But with the advent of GPT-5.6, it was noticed that GPT-5.6 has started giving very few references to Reddit. In fact, a lot of rankings that were coming because of Reddit dropped.
And the same happened with YouTube also. So this means that Reddit and YouTube are not the sources to go for if you want to rank your websites. They are still a good place to be for legitimate discussions, genuinely trying to help people, and then somebody might come back to your website and look you up. But yes, I would not recommend Reddit anymore for just going ahead and putting out a lot of content.
Now, recently, a client came to us. When somebody is searching for a service like that in their city, the competitors are coming, but they’re not coming. Why is that?
We didn’t have an answer to that. So, what we did is we asked the search engine directly: “Why is it recommending the competitors, but why is it not recommending our client?”
And then ChatGPT gave the answer that, for each competitor, it told us exactly why the competitor is being recommended. In one of the cases, one of the competitors had a very good Google Business Profile. Another competitor had good ratings on Clutch. Another had a lot of service pages, plus they had won a lot of awards. One competitor had a lot of case studies on their website.
ChatGPT itself told us why it was recommending competitors and why it was not recommending our client. One of the main things it said was that there’s an aggregator website on which all the competitors are present, and it is taking that as a master source, but our client is not present on that website.
When we asked our client why it was not present on that website, it just said that it doesn’t want to be on that website. We said, “But it doesn’t matter whether you want to be or not. That is the master source where ChatGPT is getting data from.”
So we added the client back to the website. Essentially, what we realized is that if you want to optimize for GEO, you really don’t have to do a lot of work trying to understand what needs to be done. You can simply ask ChatGPT why it is recommending the competitors and why it’s not recommending you. And then, based on the recommendations given by ChatGPT, we just need to act on them.
So it really is that simple. I am not telling you any tools to use. I’m not telling you any expensive content to create and all.
I am simply saying that if there is a keyword which is important for you, go search for that keyword on ChatGPT and see whether it is giving your name or not. If it is not giving your name, then ask: “Does ChatGPT consider you as a worthy candidate for that category?”
If it says it doesn’t, then ask why it doesn’t. If it says, “Yes, I do consider you,” then ask: “Okay, if you do consider me, then why didn’t you recommend my name, and why did you recommend the names of my competitors?” And ask it to tell clearly about each competitor: “Why did you pick that competitor over me?”
Now ChatGPT will give you an exact list of what your competitors are doing better than you. Now, make a list out of that, start working on it, execute it, and slowly, steadily, you’ll also start coming in AEO and GEO.
Closing Thoughts
And that’s pretty much it. It’s not rocket science. I think this is the first time it has happened that, to rank somewhere, we’re able to ask the tool what we should do to rank. In the case of Google, it was always a black box. We would not know why a website is ranking and why our website is not ranking. We knew what activities we had to do, but after that, it was a lot of guesswork whether that would work or not.
But in the case of AEO and GEO, that’s not the case anymore. We can ask these chat agents directly what we need to do, and they’ll tell us. They’ll also go ahead and do it for us.
For example, if they tell us, “Okay, we need to make this type of content,” then they’ll go and make that content also for us.
Essentially, they’ll give us the steps to do. They’ll help us do some of those steps. We’ll take care of the remaining steps, and that should work out for us.
So go ahead and follow this simple strategy and see how you start showing up in AEO and GEO. And in case you need any help from us, feel free to get in touch.
