I’ll be honest, when “AEO” and “GEO” started appearing in marketing conversations, my first instinct was that it was SEO with a new coat of paint, another acronym for agencies to sell as a shiny add-on. Having actually looked into where the term came from, I’ve changed my mind. It’s describing something real, and it’s worth any UK business owner understanding, even if you never touch the technical side yourself.
The term Generative Engine Optimisation was coined in a November 2023 academic paper by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, later accepted at one of the major computer science conferences (KDD 2024). Their core finding was that content can be deliberately optimised to appear more often inside AI-generated answers, and that doing so boosts visibility in those answers by up to 40% (Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan & Deshpande, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, 2023). That’s not marketing spin, it’s a measured result from a proper benchmark of 10,000 real queries. Something genuinely changes about how content gets chosen when an AI is writing the summary instead of a search engine ranking a list of links.
Ranking a list versus writing a summary
Traditional SEO is built around a fairly simple mental model: your page competes for one of ten slots on a results page, and higher is better. Answer Engine Optimisation is solving a different problem entirely. There’s no list of ten. There’s a single generated paragraph, and your content either gets pulled into that paragraph as a source, or it doesn’t feature at all. The unit you’re optimising for isn’t “position”, it’s whether you get cited.
This matters because being cited and ranking well turn out to be far less correlated than most people assume. BrightEdge’s tracking of AI Overview citations found that only around 17% of the sources cited inside an AI Overview also rank in the traditional organic top ten for that same query, a gap that’s stayed roughly flat for months (BrightEdge, 2026). Put plainly, roughly five out of six citations are pulling from content that never made it to page one in the conventional sense. If your only visibility strategy is chasing a top-ten organic ranking, you’re optimising for a surface that increasingly isn’t where the AI is actually looking.
What actually seems to move the needle
I’d treat most of the “AEO checklists” doing the rounds with a healthy dose of scepticism, a lot of it is repackaged best-practice content writing dressed up as a new discipline. But there is a consistent thread across the credible research, and it comes down to something fairly unglamorous: making claims easy for a language model to extract, verify, and quote with confidence. That tends to mean specific figures rather than vague statements, clearly attributed sources rather than unsourced assertions, and content structured so a single paragraph or sentence can stand alone as a citable fact, rather than requiring the reader to piece meaning together across a whole page.
None of that is really new advice, incidentally. It’s closer to good journalism and clear technical writing than it is to any AI-specific trick. What’s changed is who’s reading it, an algorithm now has to lift a claim out of your page and represent it accurately in someone else’s words, which puts a premium on writing that’s unambiguous and well-evidenced in the first place.
What I’d actually do about it
I wouldn’t recommend treating AEO as a separate project bolted onto your existing marketing. The businesses winning citations aren’t running two parallel content strategies, one for humans and one for AI, they’re simply writing genuinely well-evidenced, specific, expert content and it happens to serve both audiences at once. If a page reads as authoritative and clear to a person, it’s usually in reasonable shape to be lifted and cited by a model too.
Where I would pay closer attention is in checking, periodically, whether your business is actually showing up when people ask AI tools the questions your content is meant to answer. That’s a genuinely new form of monitoring that most businesses aren’t yet doing, and it’s worth building into a normal marketing review rather than treating it as a one-off audit.
AEO is a rapidly evolving market, and very few people can say they have an up-to-date understanding of every nuance. In fact, at ZenithSpark, we go as far as to say we don’t know everything. We do however have a long track record of using similar methodology and of adapting our techniques to new changes. To talk through this, give us a call on 01384 468035 or use our contact form
Sources: