FAQtopus™

Generative engine optimization, GEO, is the practice of making content easy for an AI answer engine to retrieve and cite by name rather than easy for a search engine to rank. Coined by Aggarwal et al. at Princeton in 2023, it pulls roughly 1,000 Google searches a month as of this week, a term still finding its footing. Read the full answer →

Answer engine optimization, AEO, is functionally the same goal as GEO under a different name: a direct, named citation inside an AI-generated answer instead of a ranked search result. Searches for the term are up over 1,000% year over year as of September 2026. Read the full answer →

About 80% of what moves AI citation is ordinary SEO: crawlable structure, real authority, answer-first content. The other 20% is two specific things: entity resolution and repeated-sample measurement, because citation share can swing 40 to 60% month over month with nothing changed. Read the full answer →

There is no single answer. ChatGPT leans on Wikipedia and cites rarely; Perplexity retrieves live pages with a strong bias toward Reddit and recent content; Gemini decomposes queries and grounds in live search; Claude favors depth and third-party corroboration. Only about 11% of source domains get cited by both ChatGPT and Perplexity for the same query. Read the full answer →

A single check is close to a coin flip: only about 30% of brands stay visible across back-to-back runs of an identical query. The fix is a fixed question set, run repeatedly across every engine, with a stated rule excluding calls that never actually searched. Read the full answer →

Usually both, in order: measurement first, an ongoing operator second. Building citation tracking on engine APIs runs roughly $2 to $30 per client per month. What a platform or an agency adds is someone who actually reads the raw answers every week, which is where most do-it-yourself efforts quietly stop. Read the full answer →

Longer than the tide takes to lift you. A controlled study found AEO's own effect on citation referrals was about 1.8 times, not the 5.7 times raw growth a case study might show, because most of that growth is platform-wide, not the intervention. We have measured our own citation rate weekly since June 2026. Read the full answer →

One FAQ page, eight questions about getting an AI engine to cite you by name, each answered here, each linking to a full sourced post below. A ninth question is being measured the same way, right now, and will never appear on this page. That's the control. Read the full answer →