SWSimon White AI

Playbook

A working vocabulary for AI search.

SEO still sends the traffic. AEO decides who is quoted. GEO decides who is remembered. The playbook is how we keep those from becoming slogans.

01

SEO

The operating system of demand. Crawl, rank, and the technical estate that still sends the majority of high-intent traffic.

02

AEO

Make the brand extractable. Direct answers, citations, and structured proof for machines that would rather quote than link.

03

GEO

Be the source a model trains on, retrieves, and recommends. GEO is how brands enter the memory of generative systems.

Framework

The visibility stack

  1. 01

    Be crawlable

    If search cannot fetch you, nothing else starts. Robots, sitemaps, canonicals, rendering.

  2. 02

    Be an entity

    A stable name, a knowledge panel, sameAs links, and a public record that agrees with itself.

  3. 03

    Be extractable

    Passages that answer the question in the first two sentences, with the source sitting next to the claim.

  4. 04

    Be corroborated

    Press, docs, directories, and industry sites that repeat your facts without you in the room.

  5. 05

    Be measurable

    A prompt panel, citation logs, and a monthly share-of-answer review — not a ranking PDF.

Framework

Passage design

  1. 01

    Lead with the answer

    First sentence is the claim. No throat-clearing. Models lift the front of the passage.

  2. 02

    Name the subject

    Use the brand, product, or person in the sentence. Pronouns do not cite.

  3. 03

    Attach evidence

    A number, a date, a method, a primary source. Adjacent, not at the footer.

  4. 04

    Stay one idea wide

    A passage that argues three things is cited for none of them.

Lexicon

Terms we actually use

  • SEO

    Search

    Search Engine Optimization. The practice of making pages discoverable, crawlable, and competitive in ranked results — still the largest source of unpaid demand.

  • AEO

    Answers

    Answer Engine Optimization. Designing content so answer engines (AI Overviews, voice, chat) can extract, attribute, and present a direct answer with your brand attached.

  • GEO

    Generative

    Generative Engine Optimization. The work of being retrieved, cited, and recommended by generative systems — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and the agents that sit on top of them.

  • AIO

    Generative

    Artificial Intelligence Optimization. The broader, ongoing discipline of making models understand, trust, and prefer a brand across tools — not a single tactic.

  • AI Overviews

    Answers

    Google's generated summaries above (and sometimes instead of) classic blue links. Citations here are the new page-one.

  • Answer engine

    Answers

    Any system whose primary output is an answer, not a list of destinations: AI Overviews, voice assistants, and many chat products.

  • Generative engine

    Generative

    A model-backed system that composes original language from training data plus retrieval. Optimization here is about being the source it trusts.

  • Citation

    Answers

    A named source in a generated answer. The unit of visibility in AEO and GEO — more durable than a ranking, more scarce than a backlink.

  • Entity

    Search

    A uniquely identifiable thing in a knowledge graph: a brand, person, product, or place. Models and search engines resolve entities, then language.

  • E-E-A-T

    Search

    Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Google's quality frame — and a useful proxy for what models look for when deciding who to cite.

  • Structured data

    Search

    Schema.org markup that states facts in a machine-readable form. Necessary, never sufficient — it clarifies; it does not invent authority.

  • llms.txt

    Generative

    A proposed root file that tells language models what a site is, which pages to read, and how to cite it. Identity for agents.

  • RAG

    Generative

    Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The pattern where a model fetches documents before answering. If you are not in the retrieved set, you are not in the answer.

  • Unlinked mention

    Generative

    A brand named in text without a hyperlink. Useless to classic PageRank; highly useful to models learning who is associated with a topic.

  • Share of answer

    Measurement

    The rate at which a brand is cited or recommended across a panel of prompts in answer and generative engines. The KPI that replaces 'average position' for AI search.

  • Passage

    Answers

    A self-contained block of writing that can be lifted as an answer. One idea, one claim, one source — the atom of AEO.

  • Corroboration

    Generative

    Independent sources repeating the same facts about you. Models discount a claim that exists only on your own domain.

  • Agent-ready

    Generative

    Product and company facts published so a tool-using agent can act: prices, specs, availability, policies — unambiguous and current.