SEO gets you found on Google. AEO gets your answer quoted when someone asks a question. GEO gets your business named inside an AI-generated response. They overlap heavily and share most of the same groundwork — the difference is what "winning" looks like: a click, a featured answer, or a recommendation.

Three acronyms for what is, honestly, one job: making sure a customer looking for what you sell actually finds you. But they solve for different surfaces, and knowing which one you're short on saves you from paying for the wrong fix.

SEO — Search Engine Optimization

The goal: appear in the list of results when someone searches, and get the click.

This is the one everyone knows. It's technical health — does your site load fast, does it work on a phone, can Google crawl it — plus the basics: unique page titles, real content about what you do, a sitemap, and pages that target what people actually type.

You still need it. Every AI assistant is reading the same web Google crawls. A site Google can't read properly is a site ChatGPT can't read properly either. SEO is the foundation the other two sit on, not a legacy thing you graduate from.

AEO — Answer Engine Optimization

The goal: be the source that gets quoted when a question has one clear answer.

Think of the box at the top of Google that answers "what time does X close" without you clicking anything, or the direct reply you get from an assistant. AEO is about structuring your content so that answer is easy to lift cleanly.

In practice that means:

  • Answering common questions in plain, direct sentences — near the top of the page, not buried after four paragraphs of brand story.
  • Real FAQ sections where the question is written the way a customer would actually ask it.
  • Structured data that labels a question as a question and an answer as an answer, so nothing has to be inferred.
  • Keeping it current. Given two pages saying the same thing, a recently updated one gets preferred over one last touched in 2022.
SEO competes for a position. AEO competes to be the answer. GEO competes to be the name that gets said out loud.

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization

The goal: get your business named inside an answer that an AI writes from scratch.

This is the newest of the three and the least understood. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity "who should I hire for X in Orlando," the model isn't returning a ranked list — it's composing a response and choosing which businesses to mention. GEO is the work of being one of them.

It leans much harder on things that live outside your website:

  • Entity clarity — your business name, location, and services stated consistently enough that a model treats you as one specific, real entity rather than a fuzzy maybe.
  • Third-party confirmation — reviews, directory listings, and mentions on sites you don't control. Your own site is a claim; these are evidence.
  • Crawler access — AI crawlers like GPTBot and ClaudeBot being allowed to read your site at all. This is blocked far more often than people realize, usually by a security setting nobody remembers enabling.
  • A machine-readable summary — increasingly, an llms.txt file that tells AI in plain language what your business does.

So which one do you need?

Most local businesses need SEO first, because it's the base layer and because a site with broken fundamentals fails all three at once. From there it depends on how your customers search.

If people find you by typing questions — hours, pricing, "do you do X" — AEO is where the gap is. If you're in a category where people ask for a recommendation rather than a list, GEO matters more.

The honest answer for most owners: you probably need parts of all three, and the fastest way to know which parts is to look rather than guess.

How we price it

Our SEO, GEO & AEO audit is free — we check all three, tell you which is actually costing you customers, and you keep the report whether you hire us or not. We only charge to implement: $250 for SEO alone, $475 for the GEO and AEO work, or $650 for all three together.

We built it that way on purpose. Nobody should pay to find out what's broken, and plenty of businesses only need one of the three fixed.

Frequently asked

Do I need all three, or can I pick one?

Most small businesses should start with SEO, because it is the foundation the other two build on. AEO and GEO matter more the sooner your customers start asking an AI instead of typing into Google — which is already happening in some industries.

Is GEO just SEO with a new name?

They share most of the groundwork, so the work overlaps a lot. The difference is the target: SEO is about ranking a page in a list of links, GEO is about being named inside an answer that has no list of links at all.

How do I know if AI assistants can already read my site?

Ask one. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask about your business by name, then ask who is the best at what you do in your city. If the details come back wrong or your name never appears, you have your answer.

What does it cost?

The audit is free and you keep the report. Implementation starts at $250 for SEO, $475 for GEO and AEO, or $650 for all three.