aideagoWhat are GEO, SEO and AEO? A plain guide for small businesses
Three acronyms, one question: when a customer looks for something, do they find you? SEO, AEO and GEO are that question on three different screens. Agency price lists sell them as separate services, but they largely rest on the same foundation.
Three terms, three sentences
- SEO (search engine optimisation): the work of ranking high in Google's classic search results, the list of blue links.
- AEO (answer engine optimisation): the work of getting your sentence used in the boxes where a search engine answers a question directly, and by voice assistants. Focus: short, clear answers to questions.
- GEO (generative engine optimisation): the work of getting your name mentioned, and your site shown as a source, in the answers of text-generating assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI overviews.
The shared foundation: a readable, clear, accurate site
Google is explicit about this: there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond normal search. A page that is indexed and eligible to show a snippet in Google qualifies; that is a condition, not a guarantee.
That's good news for a small business: you don't need three agencies. The same basic work helps all three:
- Bots must be able to read your site. Your robots.txt shouldn't block Googlebot, Bing or the search bots of AI assistants (for example OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT). OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. More in our AI bots guide.
- Important information must be text. Don't leave your price list, address or services only inside a photo or a PDF. Google also recommends keeping important content in text form.
- Every important topic needs a page. "Teeth whitening", "meeting room", "service in Russian": a clear page or section for each thing customers look for.
- Questions must be answered. Put the questions customers ask you on the phone on your page and give the answer in the first sentence. That feeds both answer boxes (AEO) and AI answers (GEO).
- Your details must match everywhere. The address on your site, on your Google Business Profile and on social media shouldn't contradict each other. The structured data behind the page must match the visible text, too.
- Internal links must be tidy. Google recommends making content easy to find through your site's own links: every page should be reachable from another page.
Where the differences start
The foundation is shared, but measuring isn't. You measure SEO with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools: how often you appeared, how often you were clicked, for which searches. AEO and GEO don't have such a tidy dashboard yet; the most honest method is to ask assistants your customers' questions at regular intervals and record the answers. We wrote a 15-minute method for that: Why doesn't ChatGPT mention my business?
One more difference: AI assistants can answer the same question differently at different times. So in GEO there's no "position one"; there's how often you get mentioned.
What not to pay for
- Packages selling an "AI file". Google says you don't need to create new machine-readable files or "AI text files" to appear in its AI features. Such files do no harm, but they bring no results on their own.
- Guarantees. A service saying "ChatGPT will definitely list you" is selling something it can't control.
The order for a small business
First build the SEO foundation (a readable site, clear pages, Search Console). Then add content that answers questions. Then ask the assistants once a month and measure. These three steps cover all three acronyms.
In AideaGo's Growth package this loop runs every week: data is read, pages are improved, a new guide article is prepared.