AEO and GEO for Small Businesses: How to Get Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI

By Michael Saks · Last reviewed October 5, 2026 · Research and drafting assisted by Claude; reviewed and edited by Michael Saks

Customers are starting to ask AI tools the questions they used to type into Google: “Who’s the best seafood place near the beach?” “Which local company installs heat pumps?” “How does my church partner with a disaster relief charity?” If your business isn’t part of those answers, you’re invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to choose.

What AEO and GEO actually mean

AEO (answer engine optimization) means shaping your content so tools that give direct answers, like Google’s AI Overviews or a voice assistant, can pull a clear answer from it. GEO (generative engine optimization) means the same idea for AI chat tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which write an answer and cite the sources they used.

Both are marketing shorthand, not official terms from Google or OpenAI. In practice they overlap almost completely with good SEO: be findable, be clear, be credible.

How AI tools find your business

Each tool reads the web a little differently, but none of them requires special files or secret markup. Here is what the companies themselves say.

Tool	What it relies on	What you need to do
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode	Google’s normal search index. Google says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.”	Be indexed in Google and eligible to show a snippet. Regular SEO best practices apply.
ChatGPT search	OpenAI’s search crawler, OAI-SearchBot. Sites that block it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links.”	Don’t block OAI-SearchBot in your robots.txt file. (Blocking GPTBot, OpenAI’s training crawler, is a separate choice.)
Perplexity	Its search crawler, PerplexityBot, which Perplexity says is “designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity.”	Allow PerplexityBot in robots.txt, as Perplexity recommends.

Sources: Google Search Central, OpenAI crawler documentation, Perplexity crawler documentation.

What research says gets cited

The best-known research on GEO is a 2023 study by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, later accepted at the KDD 2024 conference. They tested ways of rewriting web content and measured how much more visible it became in AI-generated answers. The best methods improved visibility by up to 40% in their tests.

Two findings matter most for small businesses:

• Evidence wins. Adding quotations, statistics and citations to credible sources were among the methods that helped most.
• Old tricks don’t. Keyword stuffing, a classic SEO shortcut, performed slightly worse than making no changes at all.

One caution: this was mostly a controlled research benchmark, plus a smaller test on Perplexity. It wasn’t tested inside ChatGPT or Google, and the authors note results vary by subject. Treat it as direction, not a guarantee. (Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”)

A seven-step plan for a small business

1. Make sure the tools can read your site. Ask whoever manages your website to check your robots.txt file. Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot should not be blocked. It’s a quick check, and an easy problem to miss.
2. Keep your business information consistent. Your name, address, phone, hours and services should match on your website and your Google Business Profile. Google lists up-to-date business information among the basics for its AI features.
3. Answer real questions, plainly. Use the questions customers actually ask as headings (“How much does a heat pump install cost in Suffolk?”), then answer in the first one or two sentences beneath. A clear, complete answer is easy for an AI tool to quote.
4. Be specific. Prices or price ranges, service areas, years in business, credentials, real numbers from your work. Vague pages (“quality service you can trust”) give an AI tool nothing to cite.
5. Back up claims with sources. When you mention a statistic, a rule or a study, link to the original. The research above suggests evidence helps, and it builds trust with human readers too.
6. Show who’s behind the business. Real names, an About page, author bylines on articles and honest reviews. Google’s guidance asks publishers to make clear who created content, how it was made and why (source).
7. Measure it. Google counts AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic inside the normal “Web” results in Search Console’s Performance report. For ChatGPT and Perplexity, keep a list of 10 questions your customers ask and check them once a month. Note when your business appears.

What not to waste money on

What this looks like in real work

When I reworked a church partnership page for a national disaster-relief charity, one of the key changes was a question-style section, “How Can My Church Partner With Us?”, followed by a direct, complete answer. That’s the format AI tools tend to quote, and it serves human visitors better too. Read the full case study.

I’m also running this playbook on my own website as a live experiment, starting with a baseline of where I show up today. I’ll publish the results, good or bad.

Sources

1. Google Search Central: AI features and your website
2. OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
3. Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers
4. Aggarwal et al., “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (arXiv, 2023; KDD 2024)
5. Search Engine Journal: Google’s guidance on AI-generated content