GEO and AEO mean optimising to be recommended and cited by AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews, rather than merely found by classic Google. It is worth doing now, because ChatGPT has around 800 million weekly users, roughly 60 percent of searches end without a click, and traffic arriving from AI converts about three times better. What helps is content structured as a question with a direct answer, schema.org data, an llms.txt file and plenty of reviews.
Comparison table
The facts in one place first. Figures as of July 2026.
| Lever | What to do | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Content format | Question and direct answer, headings, tables | +28 to 40 % probability of citation |
| Structured data | schema.org Product, Offer, Review, AggregateRating | AI understands price, availability, rating |
| llms.txt | A file that guides AI around your site | Easier for models to process your content |
| Reviews | Collect and display ratings | Strongly influence recommendations |
| Domain authority | Content that independent sources link to | Top 5 domains take 38 % of citations |
The statistics come largely from the US market in 2025, though the trend holds in the Czech market too. Traffic from AI converts roughly 3 times better than traffic from classic search.
What GEO and AEO are, and how they differ from SEO
Classic SEO is about a search engine placing you as high as possible in its results. GEO, generative engine optimisation, and AEO, answer engine optimisation, are after something else: getting the AI to cite or recommend you inside its answer. The difference is where the value has moved. It used to be about being first in a list of links. Now it is about being the answer.
Why is this not just another acronym? Because roughly 60 percent of searches in 2025 ended without a single click. When an AI answer appears at the top, the click-through rate of the first position falls to something like 2.6 percent and organic traffic drops by more than 30 percent. Your customer gets the answer straight away and never reaches your site, unless that answer mentions you.
Why to deal with it now
The numbers around AI search stopped being marginal a while ago. ChatGPT reports around 800 million weekly active users, roughly double what it had at the start of 2025, and Perplexity handles around 780 million queries a month. People are not only searching through them, they are buying: 61 percent of consumers have already used a tool like ChatGPT to make a purchase and 64 percent plan to in 2026.
The strongest argument, though, is the quality of that traffic. Visits from AI search engines measure roughly 4.4 times more valuable and convert about three times better than visits from classic search. Brands that AI cites in its answers report around 38 percent more clicks. Few visits, in other words, but seriously good ones.
And now the best part if you are small. Most large companies have already launched a GEO initiative, while most small and mid-sized stores have not started at all. That is a window, and it closes in a year or two.
The size of the market says the same thing. GEO services were worth around a billion dollars in 2025 and forecasts talk about growth to seventeen billion by 2034. This is not a fad. It is a new layer of marketing being born, and being born quickly.
How to get into AI answers
The most effective lever is how you write. Structured formatting, meaning headings, bullets, numbered lists and tables, raises the probability of a citation by 28 to 40 percent. AI pulls an answer out of that kind of text easily. So write in a question and direct answer style: open a section with the question the way a customer would ask it, and put a short clear answer immediately underneath.
The second layer is schema.org structured data. On products that means the Product, Offer, Review and AggregateRating types, so the AI understands price, availability and rating. An llms.txt file goes with it, telling AI models what is on the site and where to look. And reviews, because they weigh heavily on whether an AI recommends you at all.
The last piece is domain authority, and that one builds more slowly. Citations are concentrated: the top five domains collect roughly 38 percent of all citations and the top twenty collect two thirds. The road there runs through content that independent sources link to, not through advertising.
How to tell what AI is actually bringing you
This is where most merchants are lost, because ordinary analytics tends to bury a visit from ChatGPT or Perplexity inside direct traffic. You need a tool that separates the source and, more importantly, attaches real revenue to it rather than a visit count.
Behio Analytics measures traffic by source and attributes orders to it, so you see something like this comparison engine brought twelve orders worth 45,000 right in the admin. Those amounts are in Czech koruna, since Behio's home market is the Czech Republic, and what carries across borders is the ratio rather than the sum. It is also cookieless and counts every visitor, not only the ones who clicked accept, so you do not lose half your audience out of the figures. With traffic as new and as poorly understood as AI traffic, accurate measurement counts double. Without it you will conclude GEO does not work when all that happened is that the visits landed in a different column.
GEO in practice on a single platform
The good news is that you do not have to hand-build most of GEO. Behio storefront templates ship schema.org structured data out of the box, generate a sitemap and an llms.txt, and are built SEO-first, so the technical foundation for being citable is already there.
We write this blog to exactly those GEO rules, incidentally: every article opens with a short direct answer, poses questions in an FAQ format and lays facts out in tables. That is not an accident, it is a demonstration of what we recommend you do. What AI handles in the day to day running of a store is covered in a separate article on the AI agent.
Let me put it bluntly. Ignoring GEO today is the behaviour of a merchant who declared in 2005 that Google was a passing fad. In a year or two, being cited in an AI answer will be as ordinary as being on the first page of Google is now.
The verdict
GEO and AEO are not hype, they are a shift in how people search and buy. ChatGPT has around 800 million weekly users, 60 percent of searches end without a click and traffic from AI converts three times better. Start writing in a question and answer format now, add schema.org and llms.txt and collect reviews, and you catch a window most small stores have so far walked straight past. And measure it, otherwise your AI traffic blends into direct traffic and you never find out that it works.
Common questions
GEO and AEO mean optimising so that AI search engines like ChatGPT or Perplexity cite and recommend you inside their answer. Classic SEO only deals with your position in Google's results. The difference is that value has moved from being first to being the answer.
Surveys say 61 percent of consumers have already used a tool like ChatGPT to make a purchase and 64 percent plan to in 2026. ChatGPT has around 800 million weekly users. Traffic from AI also converts roughly three times better than traffic from classic search.
Write in a question and direct answer format, use headings, bullets and tables, add schema.org structured data (Product, Offer, Review, AggregateRating), publish an llms.txt file and collect reviews. Structured content raises the odds of a citation by 28 to 40 percent.
You need analytics that separates the source and attaches revenue to it, because ordinary tools often bury AI visits inside direct traffic. Behio Analytics measures sources and orders and is cookieless, so it counts every visitor rather than only the ones who accepted cookies.
Yes, and especially now. Most large companies are already on it while most small and mid-sized stores have not started, which makes it a window of opportunity. The basic steps, meaning content format, schema.org and reviews, cost no money either, just some work.
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