What is AEO/GEO? A practical guide for small businesses

For twenty years, being "found" online meant one thing: rank on the first page of Google. That page is quietly disappearing. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overview a question, they get a written answer with a handful of sources — and most never click through to a website at all.

That shift has a name: AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation). Different acronyms, same goal — making sure your business is the source an AI system cites when it answers a question in your category.

How AEO/GEO differs from classic SEO

Traditional SEO optimises a page to rank in a list of ten links. A searcher scans titles, picks one, and clicks through. AEO/GEO optimises for a single, synthesized answer — often with no click at all. That changes what "good content" means:

• Answer-shaped content. Direct, specific answers near the top of the page, not buried under 1,500 words of preamble.
• Structured data. Schema markup that tells AI crawlers exactly what your page is about, in a format machines parse reliably.
• Crawler access. Many sites unintentionally block AI crawlers (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot) in robots.txt — invisible to humans, fatal to citations.
• Source trust signals. Author credentials, consistent business information, and third-party mentions all feed into whether an AI system treats you as a citable source.

Where to start

Before changing anything, find out what AI assistants currently say about your business and your competitors. That single audit — run across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — usually reveals the gap immediately: competitors getting cited for questions you could easily answer better.

From there, the work is unglamorous but concrete: rewrite key pages to answer the exact questions customers ask, add schema, fix crawler access, and publish content in the tight, sourced format assistants actually quote. Then track citations monthly, the same way you'd track rankings.

The bottom line

AEO/GEO isn't a replacement discipline you bolt onto SEO later — it's the same underlying goal (being found by the people looking for you) applied to how search actually works today. Businesses that treat it as a 2026 priority, not a 2028 someday, are the ones showing up in the answers right now.