Service / 07 · AI & GEO SEO
AI & GEO SEO consultant in Mumbai.
Search split in two. Google still sends the traffic — but ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity now answer buying questions without ever showing your site. I audit both layers and hand you one roadmap.
Two layers, one report Years on SEO
12+
Sites audited
150+
AI engines audited
06
AIO inclusions
Multiple
Definitions / 02
What GEO, AEO
and AIO actually mean.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is getting your business named and cited inside AI-generated answers. It is not a replacement for SEO — it is a second layer, and it runs on different signals: entities, structured data, third-party citations, and questions answered directly.
| Acronym | Expansion | What it optimises | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Search Engine Optimisation | Ranking a page inside a list of results. | Google and Bing blue links, Maps, image results |
| AEO | Answer Engine Optimisation | Being the single direct answer to a question. | Featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants |
| GEO | Generative Engine Optimisation | Being cited inside an answer the AI writes itself. | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude |
| AIO | AI Optimisation | Umbrella term — in practice, usually Google only. | Google's AI Overviews block, above the blue links |
Most agencies sell all four as one line item. They are not one line item — they need different work, and they are measured differently. If you want this delivered rather than advised on, my agency runs AI & GEO SEO as a published-rate retainer from ₹15,000/month.
Symptoms / 03
How you find out
AI cannot see you.
You rank on Google, but ChatGPT has never heard of you
Ask an assistant the question your best customer asks. If it names three competitors and not you, that is your AI visibility, measured. Holding position three changes nothing here — the model is not reading a results page.
Traffic fell but your rankings did not
The AI Overviews pattern. The answer now sits above you and the click never happens. Your rank tracker reports a good month while enquiries quietly dry up, which is why the two reports disagree.
Your SEO report has no AI column
Impressions, clicks, average position — all Google, all layer one. If nobody on the account has opened an assistant to check whether you get mentioned, nobody is managing the half of search that is growing.
Your site is unreadable to the models
No structured data, no entity clarity, no llms.txt, sometimes a robots.txt quietly blocking AI crawlers outright. A model cannot cite a page it cannot parse, and no amount of publishing fixes that first.
What I do / 04
Audit the models.
Then fix what they read.
Six pieces of work. Month one is mostly engineering rather than blogging — because a model cannot cite a page it cannot parse.
-
01
AI visibility audit
I run your real buying questions through ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity and hand you the transcripts. You see who gets named instead of you, on which prompts, and which URL the model cited. This is the baseline — everything else is measured against it.
-
02
Entity & schema architecture
Organization, Person, Service, FAQPage, DefinedTerm and Breadcrumb markup designed as one connected graph, not six disconnected snippets. 71% of the pages ChatGPT cites carry structured data (Ahrefs) — this is an engineering fix, not a budget question.
-
03
Answer-first content design
Models lift passages that answer the question inside the first 40–60 words. I restructure your money pages and brief the new ones so the answer sits at the top and the evidence sits under it. Same content, radically different liftability.
-
04
Crawler policy & llms.txt
GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and CCBot named and decided on purpose in robots.txt, plus an llms.txt at your root that states plainly who you are and which pages matter. Half the sites I audit are blocking the models by accident.
-
05
Citation tracking & share of voice
A fixed list of buying questions, run on a fixed schedule, against each engine that matters to you. The record shows whether you were named, which page was cited, and which competitor took the slot when you were not.
-
06
Both layers, one roadmap
Google still sends the traffic. AI answers absorb the questions. The pages that get cited are usually the pages that were already technically sound — so the technical SEO roadmap and the GEO roadmap are one document, sequenced together.
The numbers / 05
One of these layers
is getting smaller.
Every figure here is attributed, because an unattributed number is not a citable one. Check them yourself before you spend anything.
25%
Forecast fall in traditional search volume by 2026
Source · Gartner
2B+
Monthly users reached by Google AI Overviews
Source · Google, 2026
800M
Weekly ChatGPT users
Source · OpenAI, 2026
23
Average words in an AI search query — against 4 on Google
Source · Search Engine Land
77%
Of AI-cited sources have a domain authority under 50
Source · Omnibound, 2026
71%
Of pages ChatGPT cites carry structured data
Source · Ahrefs
How it works / 06
Engagement model.
-
01
Free visibility check
Send the domain and the five questions your buyers actually ask. I run them across the engines before we speak and bring the transcripts to the call. No charge, no obligation, yours to keep either way.
-
02
Audit & roadmap
Two weeks. Technical SEO and AI-readiness in one document: schema graph, answer-first gaps, crawler policy, entity clarity, and the prompt set worth competing for. Prioritised by effort against likely return.
-
03
Implementation support
Your dev and content team, your agency, or mine. I write the briefs, review the schema, sign off the deploys, and validate that what shipped is what was specified. Six to ten hours a week during active build.
-
04
Measure both layers
One monthly review. Google rank movement on one side, AI citation share on the other, in plain language. Citation share moves in steps rather than a smooth curve, and the report says so honestly.
Want to see the method deployed rather than described? The agency page ships every tactic on it — a live llms.txt, an explicit AI crawler policy, layered schema, and answer-first structure throughout. Read it, then check whether the agency pitching you AI visibility does any of it themselves.
FAQ / 07
AI & GEO SEO, answered.
- What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)? +
- GEO is the practice of getting your business named and cited inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. Where SEO competes for a position in a list of links, GEO competes to be one of the sources the model quotes while writing its answer. It runs on different signals: entity clarity, structured data, third-party citations, and questions answered directly and early on the page.
- What is the difference between SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO? +
- SEO optimises for ranking a page in a list of results. AEO optimises for being the single direct answer — featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants. GEO optimises for being cited inside an answer the AI writes itself. AIO is an umbrella term that, in practice, usually means Google AI Overviews specifically. They overlap, but they are not interchangeable: they need different work and they are measured differently. Most proposals sell all four as one word.
- How do I get my business cited by ChatGPT? +
- Four things, in order. Make the site machine-readable: structured data, clean HTML, AI crawlers explicitly allowed in robots.txt. Answer real questions directly, with the core answer inside the first 40–60 words. Build entity clarity so the model knows who you are and what you do. Then earn third-party mentions, because models weigh what other sites say about you. There is no submission form and no paid placement — anyone selling one is selling nothing.
- Is my business too small to get cited in AI answers? +
- Usually you have a better shot here than on Google. 77% of sources cited by AI assistants have a domain authority under 50, and in one study of 48,560 cited domains, more than 33,000 appeared fewer than ten times each (Omnibound, 2026). Models reward specific, well-structured answers to narrow questions, which favours a focused Mumbai business over a broad national brand on exactly the queries you care about.
- Can you guarantee I will appear in ChatGPT or AI Overviews? +
- No, and be sceptical of anyone who does. Nobody controls what a language model outputs, and citation sets shift between model versions — this is less controllable than Google rankings, where I also refuse to promise positions. What I commit to is the work, the measurement, and a monthly record of which prompts name you and which name a competitor.
- Does traditional SEO still matter now that AI Overviews exist? +
- Yes, and it is still where most of the traffic is. But it is contracting: Gartner forecast a 25% fall in traditional search volume by 2026, and AI Overviews now reach over two billion users a month. The pages that get cited by AI are usually pages that were already technically sound, so the two layers reinforce each other. Dropping SEO for GEO would be a mistake. Running SEO alone is the more common one.
- What is llms.txt and do I actually need one? +
- llms.txt is a plain-text file at your site root summarising what your organisation does and which pages matter, written for language models rather than search crawlers. It is a proposed convention, not an official standard, and it is not a ranking factor. It is also cheap, it makes your positioning unambiguous, and it costs nothing to be wrong about — which is why I ship one on every engagement.
- How long before AI citations move? +
- Technical and schema fixes often show within two to six weeks, because they change what the crawler can read. Genuine citation share on competitive commercial questions takes three to six months, and it moves in steps as models refresh rather than climbing smoothly. Anyone quoting thirty days is selling something. You see the audit and the work in month one either way.
- Do you consult, or do you do it for you? +
- This page is the consulting engagement: audit, roadmap, briefs, sign-off, measurement — judgment rather than retainer activity. If you would rather it was simply done for you, my agency TNXN runs a done-for-you AI & GEO SEO retainer with published rates from ₹15,000/month, month to month, no lock-in. Same method, different delivery model.
— Next step
Send me five questions. I will ask the models before we talk.
The domain, and the five questions your buyers actually ask. I run them across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity and bring the transcripts to the call — free, and yours to keep whether we work together or not. For done-for-you delivery on a published monthly rate, my agency runs AI & GEO SEO from ₹15,000/month with no lock-in.
Also see · SEO expert · SEO after AI Overviews · When ChatGPT ate your traffic