Getting named and cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
AI search optimization signals explained: what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews actually look for before citing a page, and how to check for them.
Answer engine optimization means writing self-contained passages, not full pages, so a snippet, voice assistant, or AI engine can quote them directly.
Generative engine optimization tools compared: purpose-built AI-visibility trackers versus Ahrefs and Semrush's bolt-on features, with real pricing.
AI visibility tracking means checking, on a fixed schedule, whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini name your brand and cite your site.
ChatGPT SEO starts with knowing what index it actually retrieves from: not Google's, but OpenAI's own crawl blended with scraped Google data.
Five real llms.txt examples from Vercel, Zapier, Cloudflare, Stripe, and Anthropic, fetched and counted, showing curated versus dumped in practice.
An llms.txt generator can produce a file that fails the spec. Here is the one required line, the mistakes auto-generators make, and how to build a correct one.
AEO vs SEO: AEO targets the answer inside a snippet or AI reply, SEO targets page rank, and no one agrees where AEO ends and GEO begins.
A GEO audit checks whether AI engines name your brand, cite your site, beat you to the answer, and whether crawlers can even read your pages.
Perplexity SEO means passing five checkpoints before a page earns a citation: retrieval, freshness, schema, topical authority, and engagement.
llms.txt explained: what the file is, who proposed it, and what a 300,000-domain study found about whether it affects AI citations.
How to rank in ChatGPT: allow OAI-SearchBot, get indexed by Bing, and write facts that are checkable on the page itself.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) explained: what it means, how it differs from SEO, and what the research on AI citations actually shows.
GEO and SEO are not rivals. Here is what genuinely differs between ranking in a list of links and being quoted inside an AI answer.