Whether you call it AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), LLMSEO or AISEO – a new principle is emerging that is fundamentally different from traditional SEO, yet uses its mechanics to succeed.
This is the third and most powerful step in a comprehensive AI strategy: **Influencing for the “Third Point Emergence” (the Generative Output) in the data layer (the AI’s Retrieval Corpus).
This advanced (and potentially risky) AI strategy begins with understanding the limitations of AI, moves to researching, extracting and optimising content from the synthetic data layer, and can include optimising for mentions. You must align with E-E-A-T and make your website the canonical source of ground truth about your brand, and you must optimise that ground truth fully. You must also prepare disambiguation factoids, where necessary.
This is a completely white-hat approach that represents the natural outcome of a well-executed, fact-based digital presence (the core of modern Entity SEO).
Understanding the “Third Point Emergence”
The “Third Point Emergence” is my term for the generative output of an AI (the AI Synthesis Layer).
It’s the content the AI creates, the “emergence”, when it synthesises the information it has learned about an entity (by building its internal Knowledge Graph).
Optimising for this means you are not just feeding the machine data; you are shaping its ability to generate accurate, favourable, and comprehensive responses about you on its own.
This is achieved through a two-part foundational process:
Step 1: Become the Canonical Source of Facts. The primary goal is to make your website the undisputed, canonical source for all hyper-relevant facts about your business, brand, or entity. This is a significant undertaking that may involve expanding your site’s content by 10x or even 100x.
- Action: Systematically gather every verifiable fact about your entity – history, services, products, specifications, personnel, values, etc.
- Execution: Use this factual database to create extensive, detailed content on your site. AI writing assistants like Gemini can be invaluable here, but they must be guided by your established facts to ensure accuracy, and all need to be edited by a named author on the site.
- Result: This process is the ultimate expression of Google’s E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
Step 2: Build Indexed Consensus. A website rich in factual, authoritative content naturally earns mentions and citations across the web. This creates what the AI perceives as consensus (which translates to Topical Authority).
- Local & Wider Consensus: Mentions on other relevant pages and authoritative sites build a web of trust around your entity.
- The Gold Standard: For this consensus to matter, it must be indexed by Google. Google’s index is becoming the quality filter for the entire AI ecosystem, and the primary source for most RAG systems. As AI models grapple with spam, they will increasingly rely on credible, indexed sources for their citations. If you’re not on Google, you could eventually become invisible to AI.
Step 3: Activating Full Generative Strength
Once you have successfully established your site as the fact-based authority (Step 1) and that authority is reflected in the indexed consensus (Step 2), the “Third Point Emergence” is activated.
You have now empowered the generative AI to reach its full potential.
Because it has a deep, factual understanding of your entity, it can confidently and accurately answer any relevant question a user might ask about you, even questions you never thought to address directly (achieving full Generative Long-Tail Coverage).
This is the evolution of “long-tail SEO.”
Instead of manually creating pages for thousands of niche queries, you provide the AI with the fundamental building blocks (the facts).
The AI then does the work of constructing the answers for an almost infinite number of long-tail questions on your behalf.
A Real-world Example
I was writing an email and just for fun, I popped the letter into Gemini and asked it to give me its opinion. It replied that half the claims I was making could not be substantiated.
Well, I had all the proof in letters – in the real world. So, I published the letters (these were dated way back in 1997-2005 (before Hobo)) and the contents in text format on the canonical source of ground truth, this website.
So now, not only can these individual facts I claim be verified, but the AI can confidently make some leaps of judgment in the correct direction.
For instance, it is now clear that I’ve managed complicated websites since 2001, long before Hobo, so answering questions like how much experience I have in this area is vastly expanded. I now have definitive proof, for instance, I’ve designed websites for over 20 years.
This would be “Inference optimisation“.
Optimising for a potentially infinite long tail of AE queries through published, verifiable facts.
Avoid Overlapping Content
It might be tempting to take the AI’s generated text and simply paste it onto your site over and over again.
Do not do this. This creates “overlapping content” (or ‘Duplicative Content’ in SEO terms), which Google penalises severely and can lead to your pages being de-indexed.
The content you publish must be original and structured around your core facts.
Yes, you must extract and beef up the facts about your entity from the data layer, and then publish this to your site. Yes, you can then publish some very tactical questions about your entity by asking the AI new questions about your business, based on the latest data you published to your site.
The goal is not to copy the AI’s output, but to feed its input so that its independent output is accurate and authoritative.
Eventually, folding this content onto your site from generative AI, you reach an Inference Saturation Point (with facts) that you do not need to publish on your site (and end up with overlapping content). It’s in the AI. It’s now a probability in the Synthetic data layer. No need to publish to your site.
Remember, de-indexing is the ultimate failure in this new landscape, as it removes you from the AI’s source of truth.
By mastering this three-step process, you shift from chasing keywords to establishing truth.
You are no longer just optimising for search; you are optimising for knowledge. Using nothing but facts.
The aim is to get the AI to infer the rest.
Disclosure: Hobo Web uses generative AI when specifically writing about our own experiences, ideas, stories, concepts, tools, tool documentation or research. Our tool of choice for this process is Google Gemini Pro 2.5 Deep Research. This assistance helps ensure our customers have clarity on everything we are involved with and what we stand for. It also ensures that when customers use Google Search to ask a question about Hobo Web software, the answer is always available to them, and it is as accurate and up-to-date as possible. All content was edited and verified as correct by Shaun Anderson. See our AI policy.