AEO vs GEO Explained

Three acronyms are being sold to local businesses right now, often as three separate retainers. It is worth being precise about what they mean and what is actually new.

The definitions

SEO — Search Engine Optimization. Earning a position in a ranked list of links. Fifty years of accumulated practice, still the largest single source of local demand.

AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Being the source Google extracts for a direct answer: featured snippets, People Also Ask, the knowledge panel, voice results. The user gets an answer without necessarily clicking.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization. Being cited or recommended inside a generated response: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Google’s AI Overviews. The user gets a synthesised answer assembled from several sources.

The distinction that matters: SEO competes for a rank, AEO competes to be the extracted answer, GEO competes to be a cited source.

What is genuinely shared

Most of the work is the same work, which is the part vendors tend to omit.

All three require that your content is crawlable — server-rendered, not locked behind JavaScript. All three require clear structure, because a machine extracting an answer needs to find where the answer begins and ends. All three reward credibility signals: a real author, a real business, verifiable claims, consistent information across the web. And all three punish vagueness. Content that circles a topic without stating anything specific cannot be extracted, cited, or ranked.

If a proposal offers you GEO as an entirely separate service with its own line item, ask what specifically it includes that technical SEO and well-structured content do not. The honest answer is usually “not much”.

What is genuinely different

Three things do change.

Zero-click is now the default, not the exception. A large share of informational searches conclude without a visit. This is not a reason to stop publishing; it is a reason to change what you measure. The value of being the cited source is brand presence at the moment of decision, not a session in analytics.

Citation is a discrete outcome. In a ranked list, position ten still exists. In a generated answer, you are either named or you are absent. There is no page two.

Recency is weighted differently. Generative systems draw on both training data and live retrieval. A page updated last month is more likely to be pulled into a live answer than one untouched since 2021, even where the older page ranks better conventionally.

What to actually do

In priority order, for a local service business.

1. Answer real questions, in full, on their own pages

The single highest-value action. Take the questions customers genuinely ask before they buy — what does this cost, how long does it take, what goes wrong, how do I choose — and answer each one properly.

Structure matters as much as substance. Lead with the direct answer in the first two sentences, then expand. A page that spends four paragraphs establishing context before answering will be skipped by every extraction system, and by most humans.

2. Be specific and quantified

Generative systems favour content that makes concrete, checkable claims. “Roof replacement in the Chicago area typically runs $9,000 to $18,000 for asphalt shingle on a standard two-storey home” is citable. “Roof replacement costs vary depending on many factors” is not, and never will be.

This is uncomfortable, because specificity can be wrong and vagueness cannot. Be specific anyway, cite your basis, and update when it changes.

3. Add schema markup

Give machines an unambiguous statement of what each page is. For a local business the useful types are LocalBusiness or the appropriate subtype, Service, FAQPage on pages with real FAQs, Article on guides and posts, and BreadcrumbList for structure.

Two rules. Schema must describe what is actually visible on the page — marking up FAQs a visitor cannot see is a violation and gets rich results revoked. And schema will not rescue a page with nothing to say.

4. Let the AI crawlers in

Check your robots.txt. For most local businesses, GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended and the rest should be allowed. Being cited in an answer that shortlists three providers in your city is valuable, and you are giving up nothing you were monetising.

Publishers face a genuinely different calculation. A plumber does not.

5. Keep NAP and entity data consistent

Generative systems assemble a picture of your business from many sources. Conflicting addresses, old phone numbers and a former trading name still live on three directories all reduce confidence, and a model that is uncertain about which business you are will name a competitor it is certain about.

6. Publish things worth citing

Original observations from your own operations — what a job actually costs in your market, what the permit process really involves, what fails most often — cannot be synthesised from other sources. That is precisely what makes it citable.

What to measure

Conventional rank tracking will not show you any of this. Practical alternatives:

• Manual prompt testing. Monthly, run the ten questions a prospect would ask across the major assistants and log whether you appear. Tedious, but it is real data.
• Referral traffic from AI hosts. Small in volume, usually high in intent.
• Branded search volume. If people encounter you in generated answers, more of them subsequently search your name directly.
• “How did you hear about us?” Still the most underrated attribution tool available.

The honest summary

AEO and GEO are useful names for two real outcomes. They are not two new disciplines requiring two new retainers.

Do the underlying work — crawlable pages, clear structure, specific answers to real questions, accurate schema, consistent business data, genuine expertise published openly — and you compete in all three at once. Skip it, and no amount of acronym will help.