Being found in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity

What is AEO, and what is GEO?

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation: setting up your website so that an answer engine — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or the AI summary above the Google results — can find, understand and mention your business. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and 'ChatGPT SEO' are other names for roughly the same thing. The words differ, the goal does not: to appear in the answer, not just in a list of links.

The difference with classic SEO is mainly the form of the result. With Google you compete for a place on a page with ten results. An assistant chooses which sources it uses itself and summarises them. Those who are a clear, verifiable source are more likely to be mentioned. SEO remains necessary: many assistants search the web first, so a poorly findable site will also be found less quickly by them.

What an assistant looks for

No one outside the makers knows exactly how an assistant chooses its sources, and that changes too. What is certain: an assistant can only use what it can read and understand. You can do a lot about that yourself.

• Crawlability: your pages are accessible without login, load quickly and your robots.txt does not accidentally block crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended.
• Structured data: name, address, phone number, opening hours, services and frequently asked questions are included in the page as schema.org markup. This page does that itself too: the questions at the bottom are included as FAQPage in the source code.
• Clear answers: every service page starts with the answer to the question a customer asks — what it is, for whom, where you work and how someone gets in touch.
• An llms.txt: a short text file in the root of your site that says in plain language who you are and which pages matter. Slimbot has one itself, at slimbot.nl/llms.txt.
• Consistent information: the same business name, the same address and phone number on your site, in your business profiles and in the structured data. Conflicting information makes a source less reliable.

Being found or advertising: the difference with ChatGPT Ads

Being found in ChatGPT and advertising in ChatGPT are two different things. With AEO you work on your own site, so that an assistant mentions you of its own accord. You don't pay per click and the result remains as long as your site is correct, but you can never force a mention.

With ChatGPT Ads you buy paid space next to the answer, only visible to users of the free version and ChatGPT Go. That's directly controllable, but stops as soon as the budget runs out. The two don't exclude each other; often AEO is the logical first step and advertising is an accelerator. How advertising works is explained on the page about ChatGPT Ads.

What Slimbot does, and what IT Live does

Slimbot is software: one team inbox for WhatsApp, e-mail, phone, website chat and social. In the Findability screen you see your Google positions and search traffic from your own Google connection per linked website, and also whether an AI summary is live, whether assistants may read and whether Bing receives pages.

The substantive AEO work — question analysis, structured data and answer content writing — is carried out by IT Live, the web agency that, like Slimbot, is part of Aanbod op Maat. The full description, the free AEO scan and the prices can be found at itlive.nl. You can sign up via the form on this page; we will contact you and together we'll see what suits your site.