AI search is not one channel and not one problem. Being findable, being extractable and being cited are three different failures with three different fixes, and buying the wrong one is the most common way money gets wasted here. This page is the umbrella: what the parts are, how to tell which one you have, and in what order they are worth doing.
The three disciplines, and which you need
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Question | Are we a candidate at all? | Can a machine lift a clean answer out of our page? | Would an engine cite us when writing its own answer? |
| Scope | Site and authority | Mostly a single page’s structure | Mostly the wider web’s agreement about you |
| Symptom | Not ranking | Ranking, few clicks — the answer is shown without you | Ranking fine, never named in AI answers |
| Timescale | Months | Weeks | Months, and slower than SEO |
A definition worth being precise about, because the industry uses these words loosely and this site previously did too:
- AEO — Answer Engine Optimization is about extraction. An answer surface lifts text out of one page. Whether it can is a structural property of that page.
- GEO — Generative Engine Optimization is about retrieval and corroboration. A generative engine composes an answer from sources it can fetch, resolve and cross-check, then attributes some of it. Most of that leverage sits outside your website.
They are not two names for the same job, and neither is a rename of SEO. You can be excellent at AEO and never cited; widely cited and never extracted.
Diagnosing which one you actually have
- Do you rank? If not, this is ordinary SEO services work. AI-search work performed on a site that is not a candidate produces nothing, and we will say so before quoting.
- Do you rank and not get clicked? Look at whether an answer occupies the space above you. If it does, that is AEO — and sometimes the honest finding is that the query is answered so completely that the click was never available.
- Do you rank, get clicked, and never appear in assistant answers? That is GEO, and it is usually one of two things: the engine cannot resolve who you are, or nothing outside your site corroborates what you claim.
- Is anything blocked? Rare, and worth ruling out in minutes rather than assuming.
What the data says about where the failure usually is
We measured this instead of guessing. The AI Search Readiness Benchmark fetched every Wikidata-listed Indian business website with an official site on record — 2,596 hosts, 1,948 answered — on 3 September 2026.
Access is almost never the problem. Four of 1,948 home pages disallow OpenAI’s search crawler — 0.2%. Where sites have taken a position it is coherent: 102 block GPTBot and 115 block CCBot, both training crawlers, while leaving search crawlers alone; 98 block training and permit search, and none do the reverse.
Legibility is. Of the 1,944 permitting AI search, 817 serve no structured data, 1,061 expose no Organization entity to attribute to, 1,455 show neither author nor date. Only 445 — 22.9% — clear all four preconditions we measured.
Caveats, stated as they are on the report: Wikidata over-represents notable companies, and we read server-delivered HTML only, so structured-data figures are upper bounds. Dataset and verification script are published.
How an engagement is sequenced
Order matters more than breadth here.
- Rule out the floor. Retrievable, resolvable, not blocked. Cheap, fast, and the reason a surprising number of programmes never needed the rest.
- Fix candidacy if it is missing. No amount of answer formatting substitutes for not ranking.
- AEO where questions carry the demand. Fastest observable movement, and the work is concentrated on pages you already own.
- GEO where the category is researched through assistants. Slowest, most durable, most dependent on things that are not your website.
- Measure separately. Rankings, answer-surface presence and citation sampling are three different measurements. Collapsing them into one score hides which part is working.
What we will not sell you
- Guaranteed AI citation or answer inclusion. No provider controls an engine’s source selection.
- A single “AI visibility score”. Generated answers vary by phrasing, session, region and model version. A stable-looking number implies a stability that does not exist; we report samples with dates and prompts.
- All three disciplines by default. Most sites need one or two. Scoping all three because they are all on the menu is how budgets get spent on the wrong constraint.
Where to go next
Not ranking yet → SEO services. Ranking without clicks → AEO. Invisible to assistants → GEO. Crawl, indexation and rendering underneath all of it → technical SEO.