When Nobody Finds You · 30 September 2026 · 2 min read
What Are AEO and GEO? A Plain-English Guide for Local Businesses
SEO, AEO and GEO are three ways of describing the same underlying goal: making sure the people looking for what you do can find you, and the systems that answer their questions get the facts about your business right.
SEO: being found
SEO, or search engine optimisation, is the one most people know. It's about helping your pages rank in Google and Bing, and in local results like the Map Pack. It covers the technical health of your website, the content on it, the sites that link to it and your local signals. Technical SEO and local SEO are the foundation everything else sits on.
AEO: being the answer
AEO, or answer engine optimisation, is about being the source of the answer rather than one of ten blue links. Voice assistants, featured snippets and AI tools want a short, clear, trustworthy answer. AEO means writing and structuring your content, and the data behind it, so a question like 'how long does a roof restoration take?' can be answered from your page.
GEO: being a source AI draws on
GEO, or generative engine optimisation, focuses on tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, which write an answer from many sources and sometimes name businesses in it. Nobody can control what an AI writes. You can make it easy for these systems to find accurate, specific, first-party information about you.
| AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Target | A direct answer to one question | A synthesised answer drawn from many sources |
| Where it shows up | Featured snippets, voice answers, answer boxes | AI Overviews, AI assistants, AI search |
| What helps | Clear question-and-answer content, structure, schema that matches the page | Accurate facts everywhere you appear, specific first-party information, real third-party mentions |
| Can you control it? | Partly. You control the source content | Only indirectly. You control the facts available, not the output |
What's actually different in practice
For a local business, the practical steps overlap heavily: a fast, well-structured website; clear pages for each service; accurate, consistent business details everywhere you appear online; genuine answers to the questions customers actually ask. Google's own guidance for its AI features says the same: the fundamentals of helpful, crawlable, well-structured content still apply, and there's no special markup or file you need.
That's why we treat all three as one connected job rather than three products, and why we report rankings and AI appearances side by side. For the practical checklist, see what to do now that people ask AI.
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