SEO Is Dead. Long Live GEO and AEO: How to Get Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

When someone types a question into Google today, they often see an AI-generated answer before they see a single link. On ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, there are no links at all — just answers, with citations. The question that defines your visibility in 2025 is not "do I rank on page one?" but "does the AI cite my content when a relevant question is asked?"

This requires a different discipline: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) for platforms like Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) for conversational AI like ChatGPT and Claude. Both require producing content structured the way AI models retrieve and synthesize information — not the way PageRank evaluated links.

AI models retrieve content in two ways: they reference it from training data (if your content was crawled before the model's cutoff), or they retrieve it in real time via search grounding (if the platform supports live web access, like Perplexity or Google AI Mode).

For training-data citations, the factors that matter most are: authority (do other authoritative sources link to you?), specificity (does your content directly answer a well-formed question?), and density (is the answer contained within one clean passage, or spread across five pages?). For real-time retrieval, technical SEO still matters — you need to be indexable, fast, and structured.

1. Answer-first writing: Lead every section with the direct answer. AI models extract the first cleanly-stated answer to a question and use it as the citation. The context can follow.

2. Question-format headings: Rewrite your H2s and H3s as questions your customer would type. "What is a RAG pipeline?" outperforms "RAG Pipeline Overview" because it pattern-matches the query.

3. Concise, standalone passages: Each paragraph should make one complete point. AI chunking algorithms split at paragraph breaks — a paragraph that assumes the reader has read the one before it will be extracted without its context and will read as incomplete.

4. Schema markup: FAQ, HowTo, Article, and BreadcrumbList schemas signal to Google's parser what type of content each block is. Structured data dramatically increases the probability of an AI Overview snippet.

5. Topical authority over keyword density: A site that thoroughly covers one topic outperforms a site that weakly covers many. Build ten deep, interlinked articles on your core topic before expanding.

ChatGPT's web-browsing and Bing integration means it can surface recent content — but the majority of its answers come from training. To appear in training data citations, you need content that was indexed, widely-read, and referenced by other authoritative sources before the training cutoff.

For real-time AEO on Bing/ChatGPT, the strategy converges with GEO: answer questions directly, structure content clearly, and build the domain authority that earns citations from adjacent authoritative sources.

Traditional keyword rankings don't capture GEO/AEO performance. Supplement them with: manual spot-checks on Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Mode for your target queries; brand mention tracking (who is citing you?); and zero-click impression data from Google Search Console. If AI Overviews are triggering for your queries but not citing your content, that's the gap to close — and the content revision to prioritise.