The AEO and GEO Evolution: Preparing Your Content for AI Search

Key takeaways

• SEO is still king: Although AI search is the talk of the town, SEO still drives the majority of organic traffic, and AI models heavily rely on the top 10 search results to generate their answers.
• AEO vs. GEO: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) provides direct, concise answers to specific questions, while Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) uses data to formulate broad, descriptive responses.
• Consistency is critical: AI models struggle with conflicting information. You must maintain a clear, consistent message across all platforms to avoid confusing the models.
• Write for the AI format: To win in AI discovery, put your bottom line up front (BLUF), modularize your content, and use a question-based approach to address user prompts.
• Zero-click is the future: With agentic search and universal events coming to Google, you need a strategy to engage and convert users directly within the search engine.

If you feel like the world of organic discovery is moving at breakneck speed, you’re not alone.

I recently hosted a fantastic webinar with Jordan Koene, the CEO and founder of Previsible.io, to talk about the absolute insanity happening with AI search right now. Jordan has spent the last 17 years focusing on SEO, and his team at Previsible has been an incredible partner for us here at Markup AI.

We dove headfirst into the chaos of shifting from traditional SEO to AEO and GEO. If you missed the live session, you can always watch it on-demand here. In this post, I’ll be summarizing the best practices and exciting news we discussed so you can optimize your content and scale with confidence.

The real difference between AEO and GEO for AI Search

These terms get thrown around interchangeably, but they actually mean two different things.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is something we have dealt with for over a decade. It’s about providing a quick, concise, and direct answer to a specific intent. For example, if you ask a search engine for the current temperature, it gives you the exact number.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about how AI models collect training and grounding data to formulate a comprehensive response. If you ask an AI model what the weather is like, it generates a description of how the weather actually feels. The goal of GEO is to ensure your content shows up in and influences those generative narratives.

Why SEO is definitely not dead

We keep hearing that SEO is a thing of the past, but the data tells a very different story. Jordan pointed out that traditional SEO still dominates, driving over 90% of overall traffic.

More importantly, these two systems are intertwined. Up to 76% of AI overviews pull their information directly from the top 10 search results according to a recent HREFs report. AI responses depend on great search engine results, so abandoning your SEO strategy to chase AI trends is a mistake.

Three building blocks to win in AI search

To improve your visibility across both traditional search and AI platforms, Jordan shared a three-part framework:

• Foundation: Search engines crawl and index linearly. AI models, however, work off training data sets and retrieve live data on demand through a process called grounding. You have to ensure your site is technically extractable for LLM crawlers.
• Signals: LLMs look beyond simple links. They cue into specific needs based on categories, industries, and consumer sentiment across platforms like Reddit and Trustpilot. External validation is crucial.
• Representation: This is the most critical block — and the one you have the most control over. You must have a clear and consistent message across your entire digital footprint. If your pricing page says one thing and your support blog says another, you’ll confuse the AI models.

Best practices for writing optimized content for AI search

If you want to influence AI answers and bring more people to your site, you need to structure your content specifically for these models. Jordan recommended three highly effective strategies to test:

1. Bottom line up front (BLUF): Bring the most critical part of your message to the very top. Lead your content with what’s actually most useful to the user.
2. Modularize your content: Break your content down using clear subheadings, short summaries, and ordered lists. This allows LLMs to pull users deep into specific sections of your content.
3. Take a question-based approach: Remember that an AI prompt is simply a question. If you address those specific questions directly in your heading structure, you’ll see a tremendous amount of success.

Exciting news from Google I/O

Jordan shared some breaking insights fresh from Google I/O last week, and they highlight a massive shift in how users will interact with search. Google has 13 distinct products with over a billion users each, and they’re pushing hard into three new areas:

• Agentic search: Users will soon deploy AI agents to do discovery on their behalf — like monitoring a specific pair of shoes and notifying the user when the price drops.
• Universal events: Google wants users to complete activities, like buying a product or signing up for a software trial, directly inside the search engine. This makes your structured data more critical than ever.
• Multimodal experiences: Content will become increasingly dependent on blended experiences that combine text, video, and audio.

Scale with confidence using Markup AI

With the sheer volume of AI-generated content flooding the market, the biggest challenge you face is trust. If you lose a shred of trust with your customers because of inconsistent or inaccurate content, it can cost millions.

Markup AI integrates directly into your existing pipelines to solve this. Content Guardian Agents automatically scan, score, and rewrite your content to ensure it’s accurate, on-brand, and optimized for AI visibility.

During the webinar, I showed how a writer working in Google Docs can use Markup AI to instantly check for freshness issues, Q&A optimization, and snippet readiness to improve AI search. If a writer accidentally uses an outdated term or buries the key takeaway, our agents flag the issue and rewrite it instantly. With Markup AI, you ensure clarity, enforce quality, and integrate guardrails so you can produce content faster and safer.

Tune into the on-demand recording now to start optimizing your content for AI search.