More people now ask an assistant "who's a good web designer in Noida?" instead of scrolling a results page. The assistant answers in a paragraph and names a few sources. Two terms describe optimising for that:
- AEO — answer engine optimization: making your page the clear, direct answer to a question, so it can be shown as a featured answer or read aloud.
- GEO — generative engine optimization: making your business something AI models can find, understand and trust enough to cite.
Both build on ordinary SEO. They don't replace it.
How do AI assistants decide who to mention?
Nobody outside these companies knows the exact rules, and they change. What's consistent across what the products have said publicly and what we can observe:
- They draw on a search index (Google's, Bing's or their own) to find pages, so a page that isn't indexed can't be cited.
- They prefer clear, specific text they can quote — a direct answer near the top, plain headings, real numbers.
- They look for agreement across sources. A business described the same way on its own site, a directory and a review site is easier to trust than one that appears in a single place.
Nobody can guarantee a citation. Be wary of anyone who does.
What you can do on your own website
- Answer the question first. Start each page or article with a two-sentence direct answer, then explain. Question-style headings ("How much does a website cost in India?") match how people ask.
- Publish real numbers and terms. Prices, timelines, what's included, what isn't. Vague pages give an assistant nothing to quote.
- Use structured data.
Organization,Service,FAQPageandArticlemarkup describes who you are and what each page is, in a format machines read reliably. - Let the crawlers in. Check
robots.txtdoesn't block search or AI crawlers you want to be cited by. Many sites block them by accident. - Add an
llms.txtfile. It's a plain-text summary of your site for AI tools. It's a proposal rather than a guaranteed standard, but it costs almost nothing. Ours is at leaveitonus.website/llms.txt. - Keep dates honest. Update pages when they change; stale pages get dropped first.
What you do off your website
Assistants lean heavily on what other sites say about you.
- Keep your name, address, phone and website identical everywhere: Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories.
- Collect real reviews on Google and on industry sites such as Clutch.
- Answer questions in public — in communities and forums relevant to your field — with the same facts as your site, and link to the page that explains more. Be useful, not promotional.
- Link your site to your official profiles with
sameAsin your structured data, so the profiles and the site are read as one business.
How to check where you stand
Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI answers the questions your customers ask — "best web design agency in [your city]", "how much does a website cost in India?" — and note whether you're named and which pages are cited instead. Answers vary between runs, so look for patterns rather than a single result.
Our SEO service builds the technical side of this into every site, and the FAQ shows the answer-first style in practice.