AEO agency: get Google to show your company as the answer, in AI Overviews, AI Mode and on Maps

AEO stands for answer engine optimization: preparing content and data so that a search engine serves them directly as the answer instead of just showing a link. At Hierarchy, AEO specifically means Google's own answer surfaces: AI Overviews, AI Mode, featured snippets, the "People also ask" box and the Google Maps local pack. For answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity we use the term GEO.

We distinguish by who answers. SEO moves your page up Google's result list. AEO gets your company into the answers Google shows above it: AI Overview, AI Mode, snippet, map. GEO gets you into the recommendations of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. The market often treats AEO and GEO as the same thing; separating them pays off because the levers differ. In Google AI Mode, Maps matters enormously; for ChatGPT, list pages and brand mentions matter more.

There's no application and no payment for it. Google picks sources that are indexed, eligible to appear as a snippet and answer a sub-question best. According to Google the same foundations as SEO apply, with no additional technical requirements. In practice it helps to have the question as a subheading, the answer in the first two or three sentences below it, concrete numbers, a clear structure and a website Google trusts on the topic. According to Ahrefs only 38% of cited sources come from the top 10; the best answer beats the best position.

For local providers, mainly through Google Maps: in our analysis 76 of 100 AI Mode answers relied on Maps data. What decides is a complete business profile with the right categories and services, good reviews (the suggested firms had a median of 4.9 stars), a website that describes your services concretely, and consistent listings on the portals of your industry. For questions without a local angle, such as in B2B, the website and trade sources matter more.

Especially then. Clicks don't disappear evenly; they concentrate on the cited sources. Seer Interactive analysed 5.47 million searches from 53 brands: brands cited in the AI Overview get 120% more organic clicks than brands left out, even though both get fewer than without an Overview. For local searches, contact often doesn't come through the website at all but as a call or direction request straight from the answer, which is why we measure those too.

A featured snippet shows an excerpt from a single page above the results. An AI Overview writes its own answer from several sources and links them alongside. Both reward the same thing: a precise, complete answer to a clearly stated question. Pages built for snippets therefore usually stand a good chance in AI Overviews too. AI Mode goes further and replaces the result list with a conversation.

You don't need an llms.txt for Google; Google doesn't use it and says explicitly that no special files are needed for AI Overviews and AI Mode. We still recommend structured data, because it makes address, opening hours, services, prices and reviews unambiguous. Since 2023, Google only shows visible extras such as FAQ rich results for a small number of government and health sites; an FAQ section on the page is still worth having, because Google and AI assistants read the text.

Not much as a direct source, a lot as confirmation. Google cross-checks name, address, phone number and services across several sources; contradictory listings weaken trust in your details. In our AI Mode analysis a quarter of the linked sources were portals. So we keep your listings on local.ch, search.ch and industry portals complete and identical to your website and business profile.

Yes, but only with the same tools you use to control snippets: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex. Setting them removes you from AI Overviews, but also from regular snippets, and you usually lose more than you gain. For most SMEs the better path is to be cited in the Overviews rather than opt out.

For your most important searches we record every month whether an AI Overview appears, whether you're cited and who is cited instead. Plus a sample of your customer questions in AI Mode, the local pack for your area, calls, direction requests and website clicks from your business profile, and the enquiries on your website. Google doesn't report AI Overview clicks separately in Search Console, so we add this measurement to your own data.

It differs by surface. Fixes to your business profile and portal listings often show in the local pack and AI Mode within weeks. For AI Overviews and featured snippets, Google has to recrawl the revised page and trust it on the topic; that usually takes a few weeks to a few months, longer for new topic clusters.

It depends on where your customers ask. Local providers such as practices, tradespeople or accounting firms win a lot through Google Maps and AI Mode, i.e. through AEO. Companies selling across Switzerland or in B2B are researched more often in ChatGPT and similar assistants, i.e. through GEO. Because both draw on the same website and sources, every one of our packages includes all three disciplines; the weighting follows the audit.

Yes. Hierarchy is an agency for SEO, AEO and GEO with an office at Strehlgasse 2, 8001 Zurich, working with SMEs across Switzerland. For AEO we work from our own analysis of 100 questions to Google AI Mode across 10 Zurich industries. We do the work or enable your marketing team in the done-with-you model.