How do SaaS buyers find vendors in AI answers?
A buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for the best tools in your category, or how 2 products compare. The answer names a few vendors and cites the pages it drew from. Generative engine optimization is the work of making sure your product is named, described accurately and cited from your own pages.
Most of it is good search practice done thoroughly. Google states there are no additional requirements (opens in a new tab) to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. OpenAI documents that OAI-SearchBot (opens in a new tab) controls whether a site can appear in ChatGPT search, so robots.txt has to let it in.
Give those engines specific pages to cite: pricing pages with real numbers, comparison pages that admit trade-offs, integration pages, and docs that answer setup questions in plain steps. The GEO research paper (opens in a new tab) found that adding statistics, quotations and cited sources raised a page's visibility in generated answers, and vague homepage copy offers none of those.
Our answer engine optimization sprint costs $6,000 to $15,000. It records a baseline across a fixed prompt set, fixes the technical blockers, rewrites the pages buyers ask about and sets up monthly tracking. For the difference between the terms, read GEO vs AEO vs SEO. Search work compounds slowly, so if you need pipeline this quarter, paid channels will move faster.

