AEO, GEO and AI-readiness, explained.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of structuring a website so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — can read it, understand what the business offers, and cite it as a source in the answers they generate. Traditional SEO competes for a position in a list of links. AEO competes to be the source inside the single answer the assistant actually gives. Optanite, an independent web studio in Thessaloniki, Greece, works on AEO as a technical discipline: structured data, crawler access, and unambiguous content an AI can parse without guessing.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the same discipline as AEO, described from the model's side: making sure that when a generative AI composes an answer, your content is among the sources it draws on and attributes. In practice the two terms are used interchangeably — AEO emphasizes the answer being given, GEO emphasizes the generative engine producing it. Optanite treats them as one body of work rather than two separate services.

SEO earns you a ranking; AEO earns you a citation. SEO optimizes for a results page a person scans and clicks, where being tenth still puts you on the page. AEO optimizes for being read, understood and quoted inside a single AI-generated answer, where there is no list to scroll and often only two or three sources are named at all. The two overlap — clean HTML, fast pages and clear writing serve both — but AEO adds requirements classic SEO checklists don't cover: schema.org structured data, content that renders without JavaScript, explicit permissions for AI crawlers in robots.txt, and factual, self-contained copy an AI can lift without ambiguity.

Ask one. Open ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity and ask what your business does, what it sells, or who it would recommend for your service in your city — then compare the answer to reality. Vague, wrong or missing answers usually mean the site isn't giving AI enough structured information to work with. For a technical read, Optanite runs a free AI-visibility check: send a website URL and get back the three or four most important things AI systems currently cannot understand about it.

An AI-readiness audit is a technical assessment of how AI systems read a website: whether structured data describes the business correctly, whether AI crawlers are permitted and able to reach the content, whether the copy is clear enough to quote accurately, and whether the page works without JavaScript. Optanite delivers it as a written report with findings prioritized by impact, plus a 30-minute call, in 5 business days.

llms.txt is a plain-Markdown file at the root of a domain (/llms.txt) that summarizes what a site is and does, written for AI systems rather than for human browsing: a heading, a one-line description, and links to the pages that matter most, so an AI can orient itself without crawling everything. It is an informal convention rather than a ratified standard, and no AI vendor is obliged to read it — but it is inexpensive to add and it removes ambiguity about what a business actually offers. It does not replace structured data or an XML sitemap. Optanite publishes its own at optanite.com/llms.txt.

The audit covers the crawlers that feed the major assistants: GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot (Perplexity), Google-Extended (Google's AI products), Applebot-Extended (Apple), and CCBot (Common Crawl, the open dataset many models train on). Each is checked both for access in robots.txt and for whether the content it reaches is actually usable once it gets there.

It matters more for e-shops than for most sites, because AI shopping agents are moving from answering questions to completing purchases. An assistant that cannot reliably read your product names, prices, availability and shipping terms will recommend a competitor whose data it can parse. Optanite works hands-on with VirtueMart (Joomla) and WooCommerce (WordPress), as well as custom-built stores.

The audit is delivered in 5 business days: a written report plus a 30-minute call. Implementation is scoped afterwards, because the work depends entirely on what the audit finds — site size, platform, and the state of the existing markup. Optanite quotes implementation once there is a real list of fixes to quote against, rather than selling a fixed package up front.

Almost never. AI-readiness is mostly markup, structured data and content clarity — work that happens inside the site you already have, not a redesign. Optanite implements it hands-on for Joomla (incl. VirtueMart), WordPress (incl. WooCommerce) and custom builds, and the audit itself works on any platform that can be inspected.

Optanite is an independent web studio based in Thessaloniki, Greece, specializing in AI-readiness, AEO and GEO for websites and e-shops, and working remotely with clients across Greece and the EU. It also builds and hosts websites, and every site it builds ships AI-ready by default. It is a studio rather than an agency, so clients work directly with the person doing the work.