AEO agency
SEO Back Office is a GEO agency, and answer engine optimization is part of what we run. This page covers where AEO came from and what an AEO engagement with us covers.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization is the work of getting a brand’s information into the answer a search product gives directly, instead of into the list of links underneath it. AEO started with featured snippets and voice assistants, back when the answer was one paragraph lifted from one page and sometimes read aloud. Now the answer gets written rather than lifted, it blends several sources, and it names brands. The target moved and the work moved with it.
That’s why AEO and GEO keep collapsing into each other. Both are about being the source a machine repeats. We run them as one engagement because the inputs are the same, and because a brand quoted in an AI Overview tends to get quoted by ChatGPT as well.
Where AEO came from
Featured snippets gave SEOs a target that wasn’t a rank. One box at the top and one page inside it, which produced a cottage industry of formatting tricks aimed at winning the box. Voice assistants made the target sharper still, because a spoken answer has no second result to fall back on.
Then the answers started being generated. Microsoft launched the AI-powered Bing in February 2023. Google put Search Generative Experience into Labs in May 2023, launched AI Overviews to all US users on May 14, 2024, and launched AI Mode to all US users on May 20, 2025. OpenAI launched ChatGPT search on October 31, 2024 for paid users and opened it to free users that December. Perplexity has cited its sources inline since it started in 2022.
Somewhere in there the old AEO playbook stopped being enough on its own. You can format a page perfectly and still lose to a competitor who happens to be named in the four articles the model retrieved.
How much of AEO is GEO
The term generative engine optimization comes from a paper called “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization,” posted to arXiv in November 2023 by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, and presented at KDD 2024. They reported visibility gains of up to 40% in their own benchmark from moves like adding citations, quotations and statistics to a page.
Put that finding next to what AEO people were already doing and the overlap covers most of the page. Clear structure, a direct answer near the top, quotable specifics, sources on the claims. What GEO adds is the half that happens off your site, because a generated answer gets assembled from other people’s pages as well as yours.
So when someone asks whether they need an AEO agency or a GEO agency, the answer is that they need one team doing both. Our post on what a GEO agency does covers the same ground from the other side.
What an AEO engagement covers here
The baseline comes first. We build a query set from your buyers’ questions and run it across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode over two to three weeks, logging whether you’re named, where in the answer you appeared, which pages got cited and how you were described.
Then the work splits across your site and everyone else’s. On your site we build and fix the pages a model can pull a clean answer from, correct the schema, settle on one description of the company and confirm the AI crawlers can reach everything that matters. Off your site we work the citation list, contacting the publishers whose pages keep turning up in those answers to get you added or corrected.
Every month the same query set runs again with the same fields, so the numbers compare. The whole service list sits on the GEO services page.
Nobody can promise you a spot in a generated answer. The systems rewrite them run to run and the retrieval changes without notice, so what you get is mentions and citations gained against the baseline, with the pages behind every one of them.
Start with the baseline.
Send us your category and your three closest competitors. We’ll run the first round of queries before the call, so the conversation starts from the answers rather than from a pitch deck.
Request an AI visibility audit No inflated promises. A clear baseline and a practical roadmap.