Not long ago, finding software meant typing a few words into Google and opening several results to compare them. Today, many buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode one detailed question and get a short list of recommended products. The AI has already done the comparing, so your brand is either on that list or it isn't part of the decision at all.
Traditional SEO (search engine optimization) is about getting people to click on your page in a list of search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are about getting your brand named inside the answer an AI tool writes, even if the reader never clicks a link.
SEO helps your page show up near the top of a results list. AEO is about writing your pages so an AI tool can pull out a clear, direct answer from them. GEO is the bigger picture: everything that decides whether an AI tool recommends your brand. The term comes from a 2024 research paper by teams at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi. In everyday work, the two overlap a lot, so many people treat them as one effort.
People are already clicking less. Pew Research found that when Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a regular result on 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary on only about 1% of visits.
Think of an operations manager at a 40-person architecture firm who wants billing software that works with QuickBooks. Before, they would search a few keywords and open four or five results. Now they ask one full question and read one answer that names four products. If your product is one of those four, you are on the shortlist before anyone visits your website. If it isn't, you were never compared.
An AI tool doesn't usually search for the buyer's exact sentence. It breaks the question into smaller ones, such as "time tracking for architects," "QuickBooks sync," and "pricing for 40 users," and searches for each. Google calls this query fan-out. The result is that your page doesn't have to rank first for the main question to be used in the answer.
Ahrefs studied 15,000 prompts and found that only 12% of the pages AI tools cited ranked in Google's top 10 for the original question. For ChatGPT it was 8%.
Google's AI features and Gemini use Google's search results. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot rely heavily on Bing. Seer Interactive found that 87% of ChatGPT's search citations matched Bing's top results. Perplexity uses its own search. Claude draws partly on Brave Search.
So it's worth making sure your site is set up in Bing too, using Bing Webmaster Tools and a feature called IndexNow that tells Bing right away when a page changes.
AI companies use different bots for different jobs. Some bots collect text to train AI models, and others look up pages to answer questions in real time. Many websites blocked all AI bots to protect their content from training, and by doing so they also stopped showing up in AI answers. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity each have a bot used for search: OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot. If you want to appear in their answers, these should not be blocked.
There is a second problem. Many websites load prices and details only after the page opens, using scripts. Google's bot can handle that, but Vercel and MERJ studied billions of AI bot visits and found that none of the major ones can. If your price only appears after a script runs, an AI tool may see a blank space instead. The fix is to put important facts, like prices, plan details, and features, directly into the page text.
AI tools don't read a page from top to bottom like a person. They pick out short pieces that answer a specific question and leave the rest. Research gives a few useful clues:
Put the answer first. Kevin Indig studied 18,012 ChatGPT citations and found that 44% came from the first 30% of the page. Use real facts instead of repeating keywords. In the Princeton study, adding statistics improved visibility by about 31% and adding quotes by about 41%, while repeating keywords lowered it by about 8%. Make every key sentence complete. Microsoft advises writing sentences that still make sense when taken out of the page.
Here is a simple example using a made-up product. A weak opening would be: "Our software makes billing simple for teams of all sizes." A stronger one would be: "BeaconTime connects with QuickBooks Online in both directions and costs $12 per user a month." The first tells an AI tool almost nothing. The second names the product, what it does, and the price.
Freshness matters too. Ahrefs found that pages cited by AI tools were about 25.7% newer on average than pages in regular search results. Keep your prices and features up to date, and show when the page was last updated.
In traditional SEO, links from other websites count as votes for your site. AI tools lean more on whether several independent sources talk about your brand in a similar way. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, mentions of a brand across the web were much more closely tied to AI visibility than links were: 0.664 compared with 0.218.
Most of those mentions come from places other than your own site. In one study of ChatGPT, "best of" list articles made up 43.8% of the pages it cited. Muck Rack found that 84% of the sources AI tools cited in May 2026 were earned news coverage, and only 0.3% were paid or sponsored content.
This explains a common surprise. A product can rank fourth on Google and still never appear in ChatGPT. When you check which sources ChatGPT used, you often find a few "best software" articles that either leave the product out or list old pricing. A link from a random blog won't solve that. Getting your correct details into those specific articles will.