Showing up in AI answers

The new zero-click surface

For twenty years, search meant a page of ten blue links, and the game was ranking among them. Answer engines changed the shape of the page. Now the model reads the sources, writes a paragraph, and cites a few. The question is no longer only “do we rank?” It is “when an assistant answers a question in our category, does it mention us, and is what it says correct?”

This surface is not replacing search, and paid media is not going anywhere. But it is a real, growing place where buying decisions start, and most brands have no idea what the assistants currently say about them.

AEO and GEO, briefly

Two acronyms are doing the rounds. They point at the same goal from slightly different angles:

• AEO, answer engine optimization. Being the clear, citable source an assistant pulls from when it answers a question.
• GEO, generative engine optimization. Being present and correctly represented inside the generated answer itself, across assistants.

You do not need to care about the labels. You need to care about whether the machine can find you, understand you, and quote you accurately.

What actually moves it

There is no ranking dashboard for this yet, but the inputs are not mysterious. The assistants reward the same things a careful human researcher would:

• Be crawlable by the AI bots. If your robots policy blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest, you have opted out of the answer. Let them in.
• State facts as clean, self-contained sentences. Models lift passages. Copy that says exactly what you are, who you serve, and how you price, in plain declarative language, is copy a model can quote without guessing.
• Give machines a structured version. Schema.org data and a plain-text summary the assistants can read make your key facts unambiguous. This very site ships an llms.txt and in-page structured data for exactly that reason.
• Make the entity unambiguous. One consistent name, a clear description, a real company behind it. Assistants that cannot tell which brand you are will not risk citing you.
• Watch share of voice across assistants. Ask the assistants your category’s real questions and read what they say. That is the baseline you improve against.

If the assistant cannot quote you cleanly, it quotes a competitor who wrote more clearly.

How we run it

Presence is one of the six stations in the loop. The agent scans your AEO, your schema, and your share of voice across AI answers, then fixes what is weak. A strategist signs the surface before anything ships. It runs continuously, because the answers change as the models and the sources do.

None of this is a trick to game a model. It is the unglamorous work of being findable, legible, and correctly described, done every week instead of once a year.