Best Practices for Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) in 2025

7/4/2025

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by AEO Checker Team

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2 min read

GEO and AEO are becoming increasingly important. But how DO you make your website and brand GEO-ready? What are the tips and tricks to make sure AI chatbots mention your website more often than competitors?

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of maximising your brand’s share-of-voice across AI-generated answers from Google’s AI Overviews to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity. It focuses on retrieval signals (can the model find you?), generation signals (will it choose you?) and ongoing measurement.

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is the on-page discipline of structuring content so machines can lift a concise, authoritative passage featured snippets, FAQ blocks, 40-word definitions and cite you without the user clicking through.

Think of AEO as page-level craftsmanship and GEO as brand-level market share.

Why GEO matters more every month

Google’s AI Overviews now surface on 13.1 % of English-language queries, up from 6.5% in January 2025.
After the March Core Update, only ≈ 15 % of AIO citations overlap with Google’s top-10 blue links classic SEO alone can’t guarantee visibility.
Nearly 60 % of U.S. searches end without a click users get their answers directly from SERP snippets or chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the discipline of making sure AI generated answers feature your brand, statistics, and insights.

1. Content Signals AI Engines Reward

Tactic	Why it works
Answer blocks 40–60 words	Mirrors the average snippet length Google lifts for AI Overviews.
Conversational tone	LLMs favour first-person, active voice; Nielsen-Norman tests show a 17 % higher citation rate for 8th-grade reading-level copy.
Unique statistics & primary data	Numbers give AIs a reason to attribute (“According to…”) rather than paraphrase.
Inline citations / outbound links	Helps models verify claims and boosts trust.

“GEO isn’t about stuffing keywords; it’s about writing quotes worth using.”
— HubSpot GEO brief, April 2025

2. Authority Signals

Presence in public knowledge bases
Brands with Wikipedia pages are 2.4× more likely to be cited in AI Overviews (Semrush, 2025). Update yours—or create one.
Open-web brand mentions
Unlinked mentions in Reddit, Quora, and press releases feed the vectors LLMs rely on. Reddit is already the second-most-cited domain in Google AIO.
Expert quotes
Contribute data or commentary to industry reports; LLMs often pull the quote rather than the article.

3. Technical Signals (Make Your Site AI-Friendly)

Checklist item	GEO impact
FAQ / HowTo / Product schema	Supplies explicit Q→A pairs; 88 % of AIO triggers are informational.
Rich semantic HTML (`<header>`, `<section>`, `<ul>`)	Cleaner chunks for scraper bots like Crawl4AI.
Fast, pre-rendered HTML (SSR/ISR)	Bots may skip slow JS; ensure answers are in the first payload.
Comprehensive `sitemap.xml`	Exposes deep FAQ pages LLM scrapers might miss.
Permissive `robots.txt`	Allow legitimate AI user-agents (`GPTBot`, `Google-Extended`) unless you truly want to block them.
`llms.txt` manifest	Curates AI-readable pages; early adopters include LangChain & Angular.
`llm.txt` permissions	Experimental but useful for “no-train” or section specific rules.

4. Retrieval-Layer Optimisation

Provide an English version of cornerstone pages LLMs often default to EN if locale detection fails.
Craft entity-rich titles & H2s so vector search matches the concept, not just the keywords.
Refresh key answers quarterly; freshness is a ranking tie-breaker in OpenAI’s browsing mode.

5. Generation-Layer Monitoring & Iteration

Metric (AEO Checker)	Target	Why it matters
AI Presence Score	≥ 90 %	Measures how often ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini identify your brand.
Competitor Citations	≤ 2 rivals/query	Too many rivals = strengthen authority signals.
Answerability	≥ 70	Proportion of snippet-ready blocks per URL.
Structured-Data Coverage	≥ 80 %	Missing schema = missed citations.

6. How AEO Checker Helps

Audits answer length & tone → flags > 80-word blocks or passive sentences.
Scans for statistics & links → suggests adding data or citations.
Checks Wikipedia & Wikidata presence.
Parses schema, semantic tags, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, llms.txt, llm.txt.
Queries ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini to benchmark live brand mentions vs. competitors.

GEO Action List

Add FAQ schema to your five highest-traffic pages.
Write a 50-word elevator answer for every pillar topic; place it above the fold.
Publish llms.txt with links to Markdown or plain text docs at your site root.
Claim or update your Wikipedia page (align wording with on-site definitions).
Run AEO Checker monthly to measure AI citations and iterate.

In an AI-first SERP, visibility starts at the prompt, not the click.
Run a free scan at aeochecker.ai and see how close you are to GEO perfection.