AEO and GEO advice is everywhere in 2026, and a lot of it contradicts what the search companies themselves have published. This guide separates the two. First, what Google, Microsoft and OpenAI say. Then, what independent studies show gets cited. Then, best practices for B2B companies and for retailers, and how to measure the results. Every figure links to its source at the end.

What are AEO and GEO?

AEO (answer engine optimization) means making your content the answer a search engine or assistant gives directly, instead of one link in a list. The term was in use by 2018, as featured snippets and voice assistants increasingly gave searchers a single direct answer.

GEO (generative engine optimization) means getting your brand cited and described correctly in answers written by generative AI: Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity. The term comes from a 2023 paper by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, presented at the KDD conference in 2024.

The platforms treat both as search. Google’s Danny Sullivan summed it up in 2025 as “good SEO is good GEO”, and Google’s 2026 guide says optimizing for generative AI search is “still SEO”. Microsoft’s Bing team puts it this way: “Whether you call it GEO, AIO, or SEO, one thing hasn’t changed: visibility is everything.”

How big is AI search in 2026?

• Google’s AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users within a year of launching (Google, May 2026).

• The Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users in August 2026.

• ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly users in February 2026.

• Microsoft said in April 2026 that Bing had passed 1 billion monthly users, and Bing’s AI Performance report covers citations in Copilot as well as Bing.

For most websites, AI is still a small source of visits. Similarweb’s 2026 analysis found AI referrals “remain a low single-digit percentage of most sites’ total traffic.” But those visits convert. Adobe found that AI-referred shoppers on US retail sites converted 42% better than other visitors in March 2026, and Shopify reported that, in sessions starting on a product page, AI-referred visitors converted at nearly 50% higher rates than organic search in the first quarter of 2026.

What Google, Microsoft and OpenAI say about AEO and GEO

Google published a guide to optimizing for its generative AI features in May 2026. Its main points:

• Optimizing for generative AI search “is still SEO”. Pages must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search with a snippet.

• “You don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search.”

• “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.”

• “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search”, although it still helps your pages show as rich results.

• “Seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.”

• Merchant Center feeds and Business Profiles can help your products and services appear in AI responses.

Since August 31, 2026, every site can also choose in Search Console whether it appears in AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Google Discover. Sites are included by default. Google says sites that opt out “won’t receive any traffic or impressions from these features”, and the setting doesn’t affect AI training, which Google-Extended controls.

Microsoft asks for content that is “fresh, authoritative, structured, and semantically clear.” Its Bing team recommends clear titles and headings, question-and-answer formats, lists, tables and schema. It warns against long walls of text, answers hidden in tabs, core information kept only in PDFs and key details shown only in images.

OpenAI says sites that block its search crawler, OAI-SearchBot, “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers.” Blocking GPTBot, which collects training data, is a separate choice. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, so you can track those visits.

The platforms don’t agree on everything. Microsoft says AI systems break pages into smaller pieces when they read them, while Google says you don’t need to write in tiny pieces. Clear headings and sections that make sense on their own work for both.

What do studies show gets cited in AI answers?

• Evidence beats keywords. In the original GEO study, adding citations, quotations and statistics improved a page’s visibility in AI answers by 30–40%, while keyword stuffing offered “little to no improvement”.

• Updated pages get cited. Seer Interactive found that 75% of the cited pages it could date (about two-thirds of the pages cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity in its study) had been updated within the past year, and that “the freshness LLMs reward is being manufactured by updates, not by new publishing.”

• A top-10 ranking helps less than it did. Ahrefs found that 38% of the URLs cited in AI Overviews also ranked in the top 10 in early 2026, compared with 76% in its 2025 study. Ahrefs notes that part of the change comes from AI Overviews moving to Gemini 3 and part from its own improved method.

• Mentions matter. In Ahrefs’ study of 75,000 brands, branded web mentions correlated with AI Overview visibility (0.664) far more than backlinks did (0.218).

• Schema alone doesn’t move citations. In Ahrefs’ 2026 test of 1,885 pages that added schema, AI citations showed no clear uplift on any of the three platforms measured (AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT) compared with matched pages that didn’t add it.

• Lists and comparisons win commercial questions. In Wix’s analysis of more than a million AI citations, list-style articles made up 40.86% of the citations for commercial queries.

AEO and GEO best practices for B2B companies

1. Answer the buying committee’s questions on your own site. List the 20 questions buyers ask before they shortlist: what it costs, how it compares, how long it takes to implement, what it integrates with and who it isn’t for. Answer each one on a page that gives the direct answer in the first two sentences, then the detail.

2. Publish honest comparison pages. AI answers to “best X for Y” questions lean heavily on list and comparison pages. A fair comparison on your site, with sources, gives the assistant something accurate to quote.

3. Put specifications in HTML, not only in PDFs. Datasheets, certifications, tolerances and integrations belong on the page as text and tables, where AI systems can read them.

4. Get reviewed and mentioned where buyers look. In G2’s 2026 survey, 45% of B2B software buyers said review-site citations were the most confidence-inspiring signal in an AI answer. Trade press, industry associations and partner pages count too.

5. Show evidence. Case studies with numbers, named experts, original data and sources. This is what the GEO study rewarded.

6. Update your key pages on a schedule. Review your 20 most valuable pages every quarter: prices, dates, specifications and examples. Add what has changed and show the update date.

7. Keep your story consistent. Gartner found that 69% of B2B buyers prefer to validate AI-generated insights with sales reps, so your website, your sales team and your third-party profiles must say the same thing.

Our guide to SEO, AEO and GEO for B2B companies shows how to prioritize this work, and our guide to industrial product pages shows how to structure pages around buyer questions.

AEO and GEO best practices for retailers and ecommerce

1. Treat your product feed as your most important page. Google says Merchant Center feeds help products appear in its AI responses, and its Shopping Graph holds more than 60 billion product listings. Keep titles, attributes, identifiers, prices and stock accurate. Add Google’s optional conversational attributes, such as questions and answers, document links and related products, which “help AI systems and conversational agents better understand your products’ specific nuances.”

2. Get your catalog into AI shopping. ChatGPT shopping is live in the US. OpenAI says Shopify and Etsy catalogs are already integrated, other merchants can join a waitlist, a self-serve platform is planned, and purchases are completed on the merchant’s own site or app. Microsoft Merchant Center accepts UCP-ready feeds for Copilot shopping in the US, and Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol is starting to power checkout in AI Mode and Gemini, so far for select merchants in an early-access program in the US, Canada and Australia.

3. Make product pages readable by machines. Adobe found that product pages scored only 66% on its machine-readability check. Put price, availability, sizes, materials and compatibility in text, not only in images or scripts, and use Product structured data that matches what the page shows.

4. Mark up shipping and returns once. Google supports shipping and return policies in Organization structured data, so every product can inherit them.

5. Answer questions on the product page. Sizing guidance, care instructions, comparisons, FAQs and reviews give AI answers something to quote.

6. Show up where AI looks for shopping advice. BrightEdge found that for shopping searches in the 2025 holiday season, Google’s AI Overviews cited retailers only about 4% of the time, leaning on YouTube, Reddit and Quora, while ChatGPT cited retailers about 36% of the time. Publish useful buying guides and work with reviewers and creators, so your products appear where AI answers look.

7. Keep data consistent everywhere. Price and stock should match across your site, feeds, marketplaces and Business Profile. Conflicting data gives an assistant a reason to recommend someone else.

How to measure AEO and GEO

Report the business result next to these: leads, pipeline or revenue from AI referrals and organic search. Our guide on how to check AI search visibility explains how to run the prompt test.

A 60-day plan

If you’d rather have a team run this, our SEO and AI search service covers it, and our checklist for choosing an SEO agency shows what to expect from any agency. For a wider framework, read our guide to generative engine optimization, or book a 30-minute call.

Sources

• Search Engine Watch, The rise of answer engine optimization: why voice search matters, February 2018

• Pranjal Aggarwal and others, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024

• Search Engine Land, Google’s Danny Sullivan: “Good SEO is good GEO”, September 2025

• Google Search Central, Google’s guide to optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search, updated July 2026

• Microsoft Advertising, Optimizing your content for inclusion in AI search answers, October 2025

• Google, I/O 2026: Welcome to the agentic Gemini era, May 2026

• Google, The Gemini app has surpassed 1 billion monthly users, August 2026

• OpenAI, Scaling AI for everyone, February 2026

• Microsoft, FY26 Q3 earnings, April 2026

• Similarweb, AI referral traffic by industry, September 2026

• Adobe, U.S. retailers see surge in AI traffic, but many websites are not entirely readable by machines, April 2026

• Shopify, AI-referred shoppers convert better and spend more, May 2026

• Google Search Console Help, Search generative AI control

• John Mueller, post on Bluesky about llms.txt, June 2025

• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers and Publishers and developers FAQ

• Seer Interactive, Content recency’s impact on AI visibility in 2026, July 2026

• Ahrefs, 38% of AI Overview citations pull from the top 10, March 2026

• Ahrefs, An analysis of AI Overview brand visibility factors (75K brands studied)

• Ahrefs, We tracked 1,885 pages adding schema. AI citations barely moved., May 2026

• Wix Studio AI Search Lab, The content types most cited by LLMs, March 2026

• G2, 2026 AI search insight report, 2026

• Gartner, Gartner survey finds 69% of B2B buyers turn to sales reps to validate AI-generated insights, May 2026

• Google, Introducing the Universal Cart and more ways to help you shop, May 2026

• Google Merchant Center Help, How to use conversational attributes and Universal Commerce Protocol checkout

• OpenAI, ChatGPT merchants

• Microsoft Advertising, Win across all three eras of the web, April 2026

• Google Search Central, Return policy structured data and shipping policy structured data

• BrightEdge, Who does AI trust when you search for deals? Google vs. ChatGPT citation patterns, December 2025

• Google Search Console Help, Generative AI performance report

• Bing Webmaster Blog, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools public preview, February 2026

• Google Analytics Help, Default channel group