What Is AEO and GEO? A Singapore Guide to Getting Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews

AEO (answer engine optimisation) is shaping a page so Google AI Overviews and featured snippets can quote its answer and link to it. GEO, short for generative engine optimisation, aims at ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude. The goal is a citation or a brand mention in the replies they write. Neither works on a site with weak SEO underneath.

Singapore is on Google's list of countries where AI Overviews show to all users. Pew Research Center tracked how 900 US adults used Google in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a regular result in 8% of visits, against 15% when it did not.

The rest of this guide compares the three side by side and ends with a checklist for a Singapore SME website.

What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

SEO decides whether Google and Bing rank your page at all. Answer engines and generative engines build on that work, and they differ mainly in where the answer appears.

An AI Overview sits inside Google Search and draws on Google's own index. ChatGPT and Perplexity run their own crawlers, then write the reply in a chat window with links to the pages they used.

The line blurs at Google. An AI Overview is a generated answer, so some people file it under GEO. We group it with AEO, as our AI SEO, AEO and GEO service does. Google's rule for AI Overviews is the old one: the page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet.

Why does this matter for a Singapore business now?

Your customers can now get an answer without opening anyone's website. AI Overviews are open to all Google users in Singapore, and that includes the people searching for what you sell.

The Pew figures come from the US. We could not find an equivalent published study for Singapore. They still point one way: when a summary sits on top, fewer people click a regular result.

Many SME teams already use AI tools for their own work, and our look at Singapore SME AI adoption covers those numbers. Try pointing the tool at yourself. Ask ChatGPT what it knows about your business, and which competitors it recommends when someone asks for what you sell.

What does the research say gets a page cited?

A paper titled “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” tested which edits make a page more visible in AI answers. Its authors include researchers from Princeton University and IIT Delhi, and it was accepted to KDD 2024. They built a 10,000-query benchmark called GEO-bench to run the tests.

Citing sources was one of the strongest edits. Adding statistics and adding quotations performed in the same range, a 30-40% relative improvement on the paper's main visibility measure. Keyword stuffing, the old SEO habit, scored below the unedited pages.

Lower-ranked pages gained the most. With the source-citing edit, pages ranked fifth in search saw visibility rise 115.1%, while top-ranked pages lost 30.3% on average.

These results come from a controlled benchmark, so read them as a guide to which edits help. They do not predict what any one site will gain.

Does Google need anything special for AI Overviews?

Google says no. Its Search Central guidance states there are no additional requirements for AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisation. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google also asks that your structured data match the visible text on the page.

AI Overviews and AI Mode may use what Google calls query fan-out. The system runs several related searches across subtopics, then builds one answer from the results. In our view this favours a page that also answers the obvious follow-up questions, close to the main answer.

Clicks from AI features are counted in the Search Console Performance report, inside the “Web” search type alongside normal results. This matches how we sequence the work: the SEO foundation first, because Google's AI features draw on the same index.

Which AI crawlers should your site let in?

Each AI company runs more than one bot, and the bots do different jobs. Blocking the wrong one can remove you from the answers without you noticing.

OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface sites in ChatGPT's search features. OpenAI says sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. GPTBot is a separate crawler that gathers content for training OpenAI's models. The two settings are independent, so you can allow search and refuse training.

Perplexity's equivalent is PerplexityBot, which surfaces and links websites in Perplexity's results. Perplexity states it is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models.

Google-Extended works differently. It is a control token in robots.txt with no crawler of its own. It governs whether Google can use your content to train Gemini models and for grounding. Google says it has no effect on inclusion or ranking in Google Search.

You may also see advice to publish an llms.txt file. It is a Markdown file at the root of a site that summarises it for AI tools. Jeremy Howard proposed it in September 2024. The llmstxt.org site still describes it as a proposal open for community input. Publish one if it is cheap for you, once the basics are done.

What should a Singapore SME fix first?

1. Record a baseline. Run the prompt test in the next section before you change anything. It gives later results a reference point.
2. Confirm Google can index your key pages. In Search Console, open the Pages report and fix anything excluded that should be indexed. Remove any stray nosnippet tag from pages you want quoted.
3. Check robots.txt. Allow OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot if you want to appear in ChatGPT search and Perplexity. Treat GPTBot and Google-Extended as a separate decision about AI training.
4. Put the answer first. Open each service page and article with a 40-60 word answer to the question the page exists for. The explanation comes after it.
5. Use your customers' wording in headings. Write H2s as the questions people actually type. A tuition centre in Tampines might use “How much is P5 maths tuition in Tampines?” in place of “Our Programmes”.
6. Add specifics with a named source. Real prices and real figures, each linked to where it came from. The strongest edits in the GEO paper were all of this kind.
7. Keep your business details consistent. Your company name and contact details should match between your website and your Google Business Profile. Old directory listings with an outdated address are worth correcting.
8. Make structured data match the page. Markup that describes content a visitor cannot see goes against Google's guidance.

If the site itself is slow or hard to crawl, fix that before the rest. Our AI website builds include SEO, AEO and GEO foundations as standard.

How can you check if AI engines cite you?

Write down 10 to 20 questions a customer asks before buying from you. Include a few with “Singapore” or your neighbourhood in them, because that is how local buyers phrase things.

Run each question in ChatGPT with search turned on, in Perplexity, in Gemini and in Google. Note whether your site was cited and which competitors were named instead. Answers shift between runs, so repeat each prompt and keep the log going month by month.

For harder data, filter GA4 referral traffic for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com. Search Console folds AI Overview clicks into the “Web” search type, so watch question-shaped queries there. Your hosting or server logs will show whether OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot visit at all. If they never appear, check robots.txt and your firewall settings first.

If you want this run for you, book an audit and we start with the SEO foundation, then map the AEO gaps.

Common questions

AEO and GEO sit in the Range part of our Gravity Framework, alongside the website build and the Marketing Brain.