First, the basics: what do SEO, GEO and AEO mean?
When someone types “accounting software in Istanbul” into Google, ten sites come up. SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of getting our site into those ten. It rests on three things: Google can read the site easily, the pages answer what people are actually searching for, and other sites link to us.
A growing share of people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Mode instead of typing into Google. These tools don’t rank ten sites. They pick a few sources and build the answer from them. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making our site one of those sources.
Sometimes nobody clicks on a site at all. Google answers the question directly in a box above the results, or a voice assistant on the phone reads the answer aloud. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of making sure that answer comes from our page.
All three feed on the same foundation: a site that can be read, that is accurate and that can be trusted. That foundation is where our work as AI SEO consultants starts.
We check your site’s health every week
Technical SEO is not something you do once and finish. A new release, a plugin update or an expired certificate can undo months of ranking work overnight. Often nobody notices until traffic drops.
So we built our own monitoring system. It re-measures every site we track from scratch each week:
- Domain and security certificate: If either is about to expire, it warns us weeks ahead. When one expires, the site and any email on that domain go down together.
- Whether Google can get into the site: the robots.txt file, whether important pages can be indexed, and whether a firewall is blocking Google’s bot by mistake.
- The whole site: broken links, pages that point to the wrong place, long redirect chains, images without descriptions, empty pages and pages that no other page links to.
- Speed: Google’s mobile speed score is measured three times in each weekly scan and tracked by the median. A clear drop opens a finding.
- Search Console and Google Analytics: whether the connection works, whether search clicks suddenly fell, and whether the conversions measured on the site (for example a form submission) match the goal of the business.
- AI bots: whether the search bots of ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can read the site. If they are blocked, the site never appears in those tools’ answers.
The system decides with fixed rules; no AI interprets the results. When data is missing it doesn’t say “passed”, it says “could not be measured”. Every problem it finds lands as a separate item, in priority order, on the to-do list of the team that built the site. One summary report each week shows what got fixed, what is waiting and what could not be measured. When a page-level problem is fixed, the system closes the item itself.
For one client, this system caught a domain that was less than a month from expiring, before the site went down.
Which searches do we show up for, and where?
Health is the groundwork. The real question is whether the right people find the site. For that we use an SEO data setup that runs on our own server:
- Keyword research: how many people search for what each month, how hard it is to reach the top for that search, and what the searcher intends (looking for information, or ready to buy a service).
- Mapping searches to pages: we decide which search belongs to which page by looking at which pages Google actually shows for it. This is how we stop two pages from competing with each other for the same search.
- Location-based rank tracking: for the searches we choose, we measure each week what position the site holds. The same search gives different results in Istanbul and in the US, so we measure from wherever the product is sold.
- Competitor and backlink analysis: who comes out on top for the same searches, and which sites link to them.
- Site audit: crawling the whole site and listing problems with page titles, descriptions and content.
What we end up with is a short to-do list: the few changes that will do the most for traffic and enquiries, in priority order.
Being the direct answer
People type more and more questions into the search box: “is e-invoicing mandatory”, “what is RAG”, “how long does a website take to build”. Google often answers these with a short reply above the results, and voice assistants read out the same short reply. The answer is taken from one page, and its source is shown underneath.
- Finding the questions: we use keyword research to find which questions related to the business are really being asked, and how many times a month each is searched.
- Putting the answer first: we give the answer to each question in the first few sentences of the page, short and clear enough to be quoted, with the detail after it.
- Looking at the results page: for the target questions, we check whether Google’s results page shows an AI Overview or a “People also ask” box. That tells us what kind of answer to expect for each question.
- Question and answer layout: we write headings the way people ask the question, gather common questions in a separate section, and mark up the page so that machines can also read what it says (structured data).
A page written to answer a question directly is, for the most part, the same page AI tools want to quote. That is why we run AEO and GEO work together.
Showing up in AI answers
AI tools pick sources when they prepare an answer. To be picked, a site first has to be readable, then understandable and trustworthy.
- Readability: we check every week that AI bots can reach the site. We decide together with you which bots may read it (bots that come for search and bots that come to train their model are separate).
- Understandability: the layout we build for answer boxes works here too. On top of that, we explain terms where they first appear and state plainly on the page who does what, and where.
- Trustworthiness: information with sources, real cases and links from other sites. AI, like Google, trusts the sources that others trust.
- Measurement: we can query Google’s AI Mode in bulk to see which sites it cites as sources for questions about the business. That shows us where we start and what has changed after the work.
More detail: GEO vs SEO vs AEO.
How we work
1. Intro call (free). We talk about what the site is for and who should find it.
2. Audit. We add the site to the monitoring system and run the health checks and keyword research. At the end there is a short to-do list in priority order.
3. Implementation. We carry out the list either together with the team that built the site or directly ourselves. After each change, the measurement runs again.
4. Ongoing monitoring. Weekly health checks and rank tracking continue. When something breaks, we know before traffic drops.
We do the same on our own site
uptakeagency.com is in the same monitoring system. It goes through the same checks every week, and we track our rankings for the searches we target with the same tools. We wrote this page as a result of that work.
Frequently asked questions
Do we have to choose between SEO, GEO and AEO? No. All three rest on the same foundation. A site that reads well to Google, and is accurate and trustworthy, is also more likely to be chosen in answer boxes and AI answers. The difference is in what we measure.
When will we see results? Technical fixes show up in the measurements the week they are made. Changes in rankings usually take months, so at the start we record where we stand for each search and track the change week by week.
Another team built our site. Is that a problem? No. We leave our findings on the build team’s to-do list, with notes that explain what needs fixing and why.
Do you guarantee the top spot? No. Google decides rankings, and anyone who offers a guarantee deserves some caution. We show plainly what we measure and what has changed.
How much does it cost? The intro call is free. The scope of the audit and ongoing monitoring depends on the size of the site and the market we target, and we settle it in the call.
Let’s talk
Let’s talk through where your site stands today in Google and in AI answers, in a short call. Contact us or write to info@uptakeagency.com.