AI Search & Answer Engines
ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews answer questions directly and cite a few sources. Learn how these systems pick sources and how businesses become one of them.
- Explainer
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the practice of making a business's content easy for AI search tools such as Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity to find, understand, and cite in their answers.
- How-to
How do businesses get recommended by ChatGPT?
ChatGPT recommends and cites businesses using pages it finds through its search features, so a business has to let OpenAI's search crawler reach its site and publish clear, accurate information that answers the questions customers ask.
- Explainer
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed Markdown file, placed at a website's root or a subpath, that gives AI agents a short overview of the site and links to clean, LLM-friendly versions of its most useful pages.
- Explainer
What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is a term from a 2023 research paper for making content more visible in AI-generated answers, and Google says that for its own AI features the work is still SEO.
- Explainer
How Google AI Overviews and AI Mode choose sources
Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode build answers from pages in Google's search index, using its core ranking systems and related 'fan-out' searches, so a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to be cited.
- Explainer
What are AI crawlers?
AI crawlers are bots that AI companies use to collect web pages for model training, to build AI search results, or to fetch a page when a user asks, and site owners control most of them separately through robots.txt.
Want this handled for your moving company?
Explore SEO for movers