In short
- The acronym
- Generative Engine Optimization. The acronym stays English everywhere, because nobody searches a translation in any market.
- The outcome
- One name in an answer, sometimes two. There is no second page of results to still appear on.
- The starting point
- A baseline: are you in there today, on which question, and which source carried that answer. Without it you measure nothing later.
How does one company end up in an AI answer and another does not?
An AI engine does not build its answer from one page but from a handful of sources it fetches at that moment, plus whatever it already thought it knew. Whoever is in that handful gets named. Whoever is not does not exist for that question — and there is no eleventh place to fall back to.
That handful rarely comes from your own website alone. It is the places where others write about you: a sector directory, a review site, a forum thread, a trade article. Your own site decides whether you are understood; those other places decide whether you are in the selection at all.
What weighs most when an engine reads your site?
Four things, with the weights our own score actually uses. The first is not a component but a gate: block the AI crawlers and the whole score is capped, and the rest stops mattering.
| What | Weight | Why that weight |
|---|---|---|
| leesbaarheid · crawler | 20 | A gate, not a component. Closed, the whole score is capped at 20 — the rest stops counting. |
| techniek | 25 | Load time, headings, meta, internal links. Fixable in days, and it is the part SEO already covers. |
| structuur | 35 | The heaviest. Entity, offer and FAQ in schema — this is what makes you citable instead of merely readable. |
| versheid | 20 | Maintenance. A page that has not moved in two years loses to one that has, even when both are accurate. |
Where do I start if I have done nothing yet?
With measuring, not writing. Ask ten questions your customers actually ask — in their words, without your name in them — and see who is in the answer. Put your own name in the question and you only measure whether the engine can read; you knew that already.
Only then comes the question of what to fix, and it follows from the measurement: which source carried the answer you were missing from. That is an address, not advice. Start the other way round — write first, hope after — and you have no way left to say whether it did anything.
How long before anything moves?
It depends on what you fix, and the spread is wide enough to make a promise impossible. Opening a closed robots.txt works at the next crawl. Adding schema works as soon as the page is fetched again. Getting listed in an authoritative source takes as long as that source takes, and neither you nor we speed that up.
What you can agree on is the re-measurement: same questions, same market, same method, on an agreed day. If nothing moves, that is written down too. A report that only counts progress measures nothing.
Frequently asked questions
Is GEO different from AEO?
In practice they largely overlap. AEO stresses the answer — a block usable as an answer — and GEO the whole chain leading to it, including sources outside your site. If you meet both terms at one provider, look at what gets measured rather than at the acronym.
Do I need an agency for this?
Not for the first measurement. Writing down the questions and putting them to three engines is something you can do yourself, and then you already know where you stand. An agency or a tool becomes useful once you want it repeatable, want to measure across markets, or cannot carry out the fixes yourself.
Read on
Free, no account and no card.