Search Engine Optimization
SEO, AEO, and GEO: What Actually Changes, and What to Do First.
SEO is still the foundation. AEO and GEO are not replacements, they are extraction layers built on top of it. If you have limited time, the sequence is: fix the page so a machine can extract a clean answer, then build the evidence that makes you worth citing, then measure citations rather than rankings.
Most teams skip step one and go straight to schema, which is why their GEO programs do not move..
How to get your website found
Search engine optimization
Is about being retrievable and ranked. A crawler indexes your page, an algorithm orders it against competitors, a human clicks.
Answer engine optimization
Is about being extractable. Featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice results, and AI Overviews pull a specific span of text out of your page and display it. Your page is the source, the engine is the publisher.
Generative engine optimization
Is about being citable. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude synthesize an answer from multiple sources and decide whether to name you. You are competing to be one of several sources the model trusts enough to attribute.
SEO, AEO, and GEO Expertise
Over 20 years helping local businesses outrank their competitors.
Step 1: Make the answer extractable
This is unglamorous and it is where most of the gain lives. Before any schema work, before any authority campaign, the page has to contain a clean, quotable answer to a question someone actually asks.
Step 2: Build the evidence that makes you citable
Models favor content they can verify. That is the entire game at this layer, and it is why most AI-generated commodity content is invisible in AI search.
Step 3: Add the machine-readable layer
Schema is step three, not step one. It amplifies a good page and does nothing for a bad one.
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Frequently asked questions
Is SEO dead?
No. Roughly 38% of AI Overview citations also rank in Google's organic top 10, and about 70% sit in the top 100. AI search is built on the same retrieval infrastructure. What has changed is that ranking no longer guarantees a click.
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
AEO targets extraction into answer formats inside search products such as featured snippets and AI Overviews. GEO targets citation inside generated responses from assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity. The industry uses the terms loosely and often interchangeably, so judge vendors on what they actually do, not which acronym they use.
- Publishing weekly Google Business Profile Posts.
- Uploading fresh geo-targeted photos.
- Promptly responding to all customer reviews.
Do I need a GEO tool?
Not to start. A spreadsheet of test prompts and a monthly manual check gets you a usable baseline. Buy tooling when the manual process becomes the bottleneck, not before.
How long until I see results?
Expect 60 to 90 days for content changes to show up in citation patterns, with ChatGPT tending to reflect fresh pages faster than the others.
What is the single highest-impact thing I can do?
Publish something only you can publish. Original data from your own business is the one asset your competitors cannot copy and the one thing models consistently reward with attribution.