What Is AIO? How to Optimize Content So AI Cites You (2026 Update)

October 6, 2026

Tin Le

Updated on October 18, 2026: figures reviewed and refreshed.

In March 2025, Pew Research Center tracked the search behavior of 900 US users and found a number that should bother anyone in marketing. When Google showed an AI summary at the top of the page, users clicked an organic result in 8% of searches. Without the summary, that rate was 15%. The links inside the AI summary itself got clicked in only about 1% of searches.

Put simply, more and more people read the answer an AI wrote and stop there. If your brand is not in that answer, customers barely know you exist. The work of getting a brand into AI answers is called AIO, short for AI optimization.

What is AIO (AI optimization)?

AIO (AI Optimization) means optimizing your content and brand so AI tools such as Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity understand you correctly, cite you and mention your name in their answers. The same work goes by several other names: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and LLMO (LLM Optimization). The names differ mostly in emphasis. The goal is the same.

Traditional SEO measures success by rankings and clicks. AIO asks a different question: when customers ask an AI about a problem you can solve, does the AI mention you, and does it describe you correctly?

Does AIO replace SEO?

No. For Google, the official answer is fairly clear. In its guide to optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search, Google says you need no special file or markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page that wants to be cited has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, like any other page. The site also must not be excluded in Search Console’s Search generative AI control; that setting has been available to every website since August 31, 2026, and it defaults to allow.

The difference lies with tools outside Google. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity pick sources in their own ways, and there, brand signals from beyond your website, such as press coverage or community mentions, carry far more weight than they do in familiar SEO.

How much traffic is AI taking away?

The three most reliable datasets available today all point to a large drop:

Seer Interactive tracked 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations from June 2024 to September 2025. On queries with AI Overviews, the organic click-through rate fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, a drop of about 61%. Its April 2026 update, covering 53 brands and 5.47 million queries, showed the rate bottoming out at 1.3% in December 2025 and then recovering to 2.4% in February 2026.
Ahrefs measured 300,000 keywords and found the click-through rate for position 1 fell 34.5% when an AI Overview appeared. A later Ahrefs update put the drop at 58%.
Pew Research Center, as mentioned at the top: 8% versus 15%.

The good news runs the other way. According to the same Seer Interactive update (April 2026), brands cited in AI Overviews get about 120% more organic clicks per impression than when they are not cited, though that is still 38% lower than informational queries with no AI Overview at all. The game has moved from “what position am I in” to “am I in the answer or not.”

For Vietnam, this is no longer a distant story. AI Overviews now supports Vietnamese, and Google has also rolled out AI Mode to users in Vietnam. In our article 68 million visits from AI crawlers, Adtek looked at the factors that lead AI crawlers to collect more from a website.

What does research say about getting cited by AI?

Add statistics, quotations and sources

The academic foundation of GEO is the paper “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, presented at KDD 2024. The team built a dataset of about 10,000 queries and then tested 9 ways of editing content to see which ones made a source get mentioned more often by AI.

The three most effective methods all revolve around credibility: adding statistics, adding quotations from people with expertise and citing references clearly. These methods raised visibility in AI answers by up to about 40%. Keyword stuffing, a familiar trick from old-school SEO, had almost no effect.

Brand mentions matter more than backlinks

Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands to find which factors were most closely tied to appearing in AI Overviews. The three most strongly correlated factors all sit outside the website, while backlink count ranks behind both Domain Rating and the number of referring domains:

Factor	Correlation coefficient
Brand mentions across the web	0.664
Brand name appearing in anchor text	0.527
Branded search volume	0.392
Number of backlinks	0.218

Brand mentions correlate about three times as strongly as backlinks (0.664 versus 0.218). AI learns about your brand from what other people write about you, not only from what you write about yourself on your own site.

Don’t measure AIO by rank

SparkToro and Gumshoe.ai ran 2,961 prompts on ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI, with hundreds of people taking part. The probability that ChatGPT or Google’s AI returns the same list of brands when asked the same question again was under 1%. The list, the order and the number of brands changed almost every time.

That makes “ranking second on ChatGPT” a metric with little meaning. A steadier one is appearance rate: out of 100 times the question is asked, how many times is your brand mentioned?

A 7-step AIO process for businesses

Step 1: Fix the technical foundation before writing anything new

AI cannot cite a page it cannot read. Start by checking that your important pages are indexed by Google, are not blocked in robots.txt and do not carry a nosnippet tag. In Search Console, review the Search generative AI control to make sure the site is not set to excluded. If you want to show up on ChatGPT or Perplexity, do not block bots such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. A single technical fault, like a page returning a 500 error, can make an entire content cluster vanish from every answer.

Step 2: Answer directly at the start of each section

AI cites passage by passage, not whole articles. Each section should open with one or two sentences that answer its heading directly and still make sense when read on their own. Explanation, examples and data come after. This style also helps readers skimming on their phones.

For example, instead of opening a section called “What is CPM?” with the history of advertising, write right away: “CPM is the cost per 1,000 ad impressions. If you spend 2 million VND and get 400,000 impressions, your CPM is 5,000 VND.”

Step 3: Own data that others have to cite

When a number shows up in many places, AI tends to cite whoever published it first. That is why original data is worth more than any roundup article. Original data can be a customer survey, anonymized operating figures or a ranking you compile yourself.

Step 4: Get other people to mention you

Going by the Ahrefs findings, this part of the work happens off your website: press interviews, talks at industry events, inclusion in comparison articles, discussion in communities. Every time your brand is named alongside the topic you want to own, AI gets one more signal linking the two. For B2B companies, investing in expert PR for the founder usually does more for AIO than building more backlinks.

Step 5: Update content on a schedule

In fast-moving topics such as advertising, e-commerce and AI, older content is easily replaced by newer sources. State the update date clearly on each article, review the figures every quarter and add new research when it comes out. A 2023 article about marketplace fees has almost no chance of being cited in 2026.

Step 6: Use structured data that matches what’s on the page

Google does not require any special schema for AI, but structured data helps machines understand who you are: Organization for company details, Article for blog posts, FAQPage for FAQ pages. The one rule is that the data you declare must match the content users can see on the page.

Step 7: Measure with new metrics

An AIO scorecard should track four groups of metrics:

Appearance rate: prepare 30 to 50 questions customers often ask, run them regularly on ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, and count how many times your brand is mentioned.
Accuracy: does the AI describe your services, prices and address correctly? Wrong information in AI answers usually traces back to outdated information still sitting somewhere on the web.
Traffic from AI: in GA4, filter referral sources from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com.
Data from Google: since August 31, 2026, Search Console has offered a Generative AI performance report for every website, showing impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device.

What you don’t need to do yet

The AIO market is full of advice nobody has verified. According to Google’s official guidance, an llms.txt file, chunking content specially for AI or rewriting the whole site in an “AI style” are all unnecessary for appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Tools promising to get you “to the top of ChatGPT” also deserve caution, because, as the SparkToro research shows, rankings in AI shift almost every time the question is asked.

AIO checklist for a business website

Main service pages and articles are indexed by Google and not blocked from snippets; the site is not excluded in Search Console’s Search generative AI control.
robots.txt does not block the search bots of the AI platforms you want to appear on.
Every content section opens with a direct answer that makes sense on its own.
Articles include data with sources, expert opinion and an update date.
You have at least one original dataset that others have a reason to cite.
Your brand is mentioned in the press, at events and in industry communities.
Organization, Article and FAQPage structured data match the content on the page.
A monthly tracker covers your appearance rate in AI and traffic from AI.

If your business wants to assess its presence in AI answers and build a concrete AIO plan, get in touch with the Adtek team.