Growth
2026-10-30 · 8 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, and Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, refer to the practice of making your business's information clear, structured, and credible enough that AI assistants and chatbots - ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and the AI-generated answer summaries now appearing directly inside Google search results - actually cite or recommend you when someone asks a relevant question. It is a close cousin of traditional SEO, but the goal is different: SEO optimizes to rank in a list of links a human then clicks through; AEO and GEO optimize to be the actual answer, often with no click or website visit involved at all.
This matters because a growing share of searches now end with the person getting their answer directly from an AI-generated summary rather than visiting any website - sometimes called a zero-click search. If your business is not part of what the AI assistant draws on to form that answer, you simply do not exist in that moment, regardless of how well your website itself is built.
This shift mirrors what happened with voice search and smart speakers a decade earlier, except the stakes are higher now because these AI assistants are increasingly where people go for genuinely consequential decisions - which business to hire, not just which recipe to follow.
“Ranking number one on Google does not help if the customer never clicks through - because the AI assistant already gave them an answer, with your competitor's name in it.”
AI assistants do not rank pages the way traditional search does - they synthesize an answer from multiple sources, favoring content that is clearly written, directly answers a specific question, and is corroborated across more than one credible source. Structured data, or schema markup that explicitly labels your business information, services, and FAQs in a machine-readable format, helps these systems parse your site accurately rather than guessing.
Being mentioned, reviewed, or cited on other credible platforms - business directories, review sites, local news, industry listings - matters more here than it does in traditional SEO, because AI assistants are often pulling and cross-referencing information from multiple sources to form a confident answer, not just crawling your own website. A business that exists only on its own website, with no outside mentions, is harder for these systems to validate and recommend confidently.
This is also why a single glowing but isolated review, with no other mention of your business anywhere else online, tends to carry less weight with these systems than a smaller number of mentions spread across a Google Business Profile, a local directory, and a review platform.
Start with a genuinely useful FAQ section on your website that directly and clearly answers the real questions customers ask - not vague marketing copy, but specific, direct answers such as whether you deliver outside the Kathmandu Valley or what payment methods you accept - since this exact style of content is what AI assistants most easily extract and cite. Keep your business name, address, and phone number consistent, word-for-word, across your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory listing - inconsistency here actively confuses the systems trying to verify who you are.
Add basic schema markup to your website identifying your business type, services, location, and FAQs - this is a one-time technical task, not an ongoing effort, and it significantly improves how clearly AI systems and search engines alike can parse your site. Make sure your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate, since it is one of the most heavily referenced sources for local business information by both traditional search and AI assistants.
Publishing genuinely useful, specific content on your own blog or services pages, not just a thin FAQ, also helps, since longer, well-structured pages give these systems more material to draw from when forming a detailed answer rather than a generic one.
There is no way to pay an AI assistant directly for a citation or mention the way you can pay for a Google or Meta ad - these recommendations come from the model's synthesis of available information, not a paid placement system, at least as these systems currently work. Anyone claiming to guarantee a specific AI assistant will recommend your business by a certain date is not being accurate about how these systems function.
Like SEO, AEO and GEO are slow, compounding processes rather than a quick fix - a single optimized FAQ page added yesterday will not suddenly make an AI assistant recommend you today. It depends on consistent, credible signals building up over months, both on your own site and across the wider web where these systems look for corroboration.
Be equally skeptical of anyone offering a large volume of fake directory listings or purchased mentions as a shortcut - low-quality, clearly artificial mentions are generally filtered out by these systems in much the same way search engines learned to filter low-quality backlinks over the past decade.
This is genuinely one of the harder parts of AEO and GEO - a successful citation inside an AI assistant's answer may never show up as a website visit in your analytics at all, since the person got their answer without clicking through. What you can track: direct, referral-less traffic increases, meaning people who heard your name from an AI assistant and then typed your website directly, and periodically asking AI assistants yourself what they say when prompted with relevant questions about your industry and area.
Being mentioned at all, even without a click, is genuinely valuable, since it puts your business name in front of a potential customer at the exact moment they were deciding who to consider, which is closer to a recommendation from a trusted source than a typical ad impression.
Begin with the basics that also help traditional SEO - clear, direct FAQ content, consistent business information everywhere it appears online, and a complete Google Business Profile - since this overlapping foundation benefits both traditional search and AI-driven answers at once, rather than requiring two entirely separate efforts.
Arcetis has practiced AEO and GEO specifically, alongside standard SEO and performance marketing, since 2019, making us among Nepal's first dedicated 0-click search specialists, under the Arcetis Technologies banner since our 2026 incorporation. It is a newer discipline than SEO, and anyone claiming deep, long-established expertise in it specifically, versus general marketing experience, is worth asking real questions of.
If you take away one action from this entire playbook, make it this: open an AI assistant right now and ask it the question a customer would ask about your industry in your city, and see what comes back. That single check tells you more about where you stand than any theory.
SEO optimizes your website to rank well in a list of search results that a person then clicks through to read. AEO, and the related GEO, optimize your business's information to be directly cited or recommended inside an AI-generated answer, often without any click or website visit happening at all. They share a lot of the same foundation - clear, well-structured, credible content - but aim at a different outcome.
The most direct way is simply asking the AI assistant yourself - open ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar tools and ask the kinds of questions a customer might ask about your industry and location, then see whether your business comes up. There is currently no comprehensive, reliable analytics dashboard that tracks this the way Google Search Console tracks traditional search, so periodic manual checking is still the most practical method.
Similar to SEO, it is a gradual, compounding process rather than an immediate one - expect months, not weeks, for consistent, structured content and credible outside mentions to meaningfully influence how AI assistants describe your business. Businesses that are already doing solid SEO and have a complete, accurate online presence tend to see progress faster, since much of the underlying foundation already overlaps.