For twenty years, being found online meant one thing: rank on Google. That's still table stakes — but it's no longer the whole game. A fast-growing share of customers now ask an AI assistant first, and the assistant answers with a handful of names. If yours isn't one of them, you were never in the running.
What changed
Google's AI Overviews now answer many queries directly at the top of the results page. ChatGPT and Perplexity answer with recommendations and citations. The common thread: instead of ten blue links, the customer sees a synthesized answer naming two or three businesses. Click-throughs on traditional results are falling; being the cited answer is the new first page.
GEO and AEO, in plain English
- SEO (search engine optimization) — rank in the classic results. Still matters, especially locally.
- AEO (answer engine optimization) — structure your content so engines can lift a direct answer from it: clear questions and answers, schema markup, unambiguous facts.
- GEO (generative engine optimization) — make your business easy for AI models to understand and safe to cite: consistent name/address/phone everywhere, real reviews, specific claims with numbers, pages that state plainly what you do, where, and for whom.
What actually works
The tactics overlap more than the acronyms suggest. The sites getting cited share traits: they answer real questions in full sentences near the top of the page; they use FAQ and service schema; they keep facts consistent across Google Business Profile, directories, and the site itself; they load fast on a modern stack; and they accumulate genuine reviews, which AI engines treat as evidence.
AI engines don't cite the prettiest site. They cite the clearest one.
The practical checklist
- One page per service and per city you seriously serve — written for humans, structured for machines.
- FAQ blocks with the questions customers actually ask, marked up with schema.
- Google Business Profile complete and active, review flow automated.
- Specific numbers on the page: prices, timelines, results. Vague pages don't get cited.
- Sub-second loads — slow sites get crawled less and trusted less.
We build both layers into every Advanced site and up: classic local SEO plus the GEO/AEO structure that gets you named when a customer asks an AI “who should I call?”