What is AEO (Answer Engine Optimization)?
AEO is the practice of preparing a website so that AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot — can find, quote and credit it when they answer a question. In practice it covers three things: letting AI crawlers reach the site, structuring pages so a passage can be lifted as a direct answer, and measuring whether the brand is actually being mentioned.
AEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are used interchangeably in the market. GEO is the term used in the academic literature; AEO is the term the industry adopted.
Does any of it actually work?
Partly, and the honest answer has two halves. A peer-reviewed study (Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv 2311.09735, published at ACM SIGKDD 2024) tested content changes such as adding citations, statistics and authoritative quotes, and measured visibility gains of up to roughly 40% — under benchmark conditions, not on live engines.
Against that, a July 2026 survey of 45 studies (arXiv 2607.14035) found no technique with a stable, reproducible effect across platforms, and noted that some rewrites reduced retrieval. So: structural work is worth doing and is grounded in research, but anyone quoting you a guaranteed lift is quoting a number that does not exist.
Sources: arXiv 2311.09735 (KDD 2024) · arXiv 2607.14035 (July 2026)
How much does an AI visibility audit cost in Thailand?
Ours is ฿25,000 (about USD 850 at roughly ฿33/USD, as of August 2026), delivered in 7 business days from complete intake. Most agencies in Thailand quote AEO work privately; when we surveyed the market in August 2026, the one published Thai comparison point we could find listed a one-time audit at about ฿25,000 and monthly programmes from ฿30,000.
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO optimises for a ranked list of links: success is a position and a click. AEO optimises for a generated answer: success is being quoted or credited inside that answer, often with no click at all. They share foundations — crawlability, clear structure, credible content — but they are measured differently.
| Traditional SEO | AEO / GEO |
| What you are competing for | A position in a list of links | A sentence inside a generated answer |
| Success metric | Rank, impressions, clicks | Mention share and citation share across engines |
| Unit of content | The page | The quotable passage |
| Measurement stability | Broadly repeatable | Non-deterministic — answers vary run to run, so sampling must be disclosed |
| Who reports it | Search Console, rank trackers | Google Search Console's Generative AI report (where available), Bing's AI Performance report, plus direct engine sampling |
How do you get cited by ChatGPT?
You cannot make it happen; you can make it possible and then measure it. The mechanical part is documented by the vendors themselves: AI crawlers respect robots.txt directives, so a site that blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended cannot be quoted by those systems at all. The structural part comes from the GEO research above — answer-first passages, cited statistics, credible quotes, clean tables — applied with the benchmark-conditions caveat intact.
The third part is off-site: the research consistently finds that widely-referenced third-party sources carry a lot of weight in AI answers. We will tell you where those gaps are; earning coverage in them is strategy advice from us, not a deliverable we can promise.
Does llms.txt help?
There is no good evidence that it does. Published analysis of large numbers of domains has found the file is rarely fetched by AI crawlers and shows no measurable citation effect. We will add one for free if you want it, labelled as unproven. We do not sell it, and we do not count it as a lever.
Is any of this measured in Thailand specifically?
Not yet, and we would rather say so. The published behavioural research on AI search — how often answers replace clicks, how much referral traffic assistants send — is US and global. Thai-language and Thai-market behaviour may differ, and we do not extrapolate. What we can measure directly for you is your own panel, in your own language and country setting, from the first week.