AEO, GEO and SEO: how they differ
SEO makes sure a page ranks high in Google and Bing results. AEO and GEO make sure your business appears in the answer an AI assistant writes instead of a list of links. They do not compete: AI answers are often built from the same pages that do well in search.
How SEO works for small businesses| SEO | AEO and GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | A high ranking in results | Your business named in an AI assistant's answer |
| Where you see it | Google and Bing results | The answer text and the cited sources |
| How it is measured | Rankings, impressions and clicks in Search Console | Share of answers on a fixed list of questions |
| What you work on | The site, links, technical health | The site, structured data, mentions across many sources |
Where AI gets its answers
AI assistants answer in two ways: from knowledge learned from text on the web, or from live search, when they fetch current pages and summarize them. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude with search cite sources, so you can see which pages an answer came from.
Google AI Overviews and Gemini rely on Google's index, and Microsoft Copilot on Bing search. A page the search engine does not index or understand has little chance of appearing in them.
Models are more likely to recommend businesses they find consistent information about in many places: the business site, directories, reviews and forums. One page, however good, is not enough.
What makes content citable
A direct answer up front
40 to 60 words that answer the question on their own, before the rest of the page.
Paragraphs that stand alone
No "as mentioned above". A model lifts a passage, and that passage has to make sense by itself.
Specifics over generalities
Prices, cities, timelines, service names. Sentences that fit any business are hard to quote.
Structured data
Organization, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList in JSON-LD tell machines what the page is.
Content in the first HTML
Some AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If content appears only after it runs, it does not exist for them.
Consistent business details
Name, city and services read the same on your site, in directories and on forums.
The same paragraph, twice
Hard to quote
As mentioned above, we offer comprehensive solutions tailored to the needs of every client.
Easy to quote
Example Bookkeeping in Austin, Texas handles monthly bookkeeping for sole proprietors and online stores, from $350 a month.
The business and the price in the example are made up.
AI crawlers and robots.txt
robots.txt tells crawlers what they may not read. An AI crawler block is often accidental: left over from an old template or set in the firewall. The key names:
| Crawler or token | Company | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Collects content to train models |
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Indexes pages for search in ChatGPT |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | Indexes pages for Perplexity answers |
| Google-Extended | A token that controls whether content may be used for Gemini; not a separate crawler | |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | Collects content to train Claude models |
| Bingbot | Microsoft | Indexes pages for Bing, which Microsoft Copilot answers from |
robots.txt that lets AI crawlers in
User-agent: GPTBot
Allow: /
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ClaudeBot
Allow: /
User-agent: Google-Extended
Allow: /
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://yourbusiness.com/sitemap.xmlHow to measure AEO
There is no Search Console for AI answers. Measurement is indirect: a fixed list of questions asked regularly in chosen engines, with a record of whether your business appears, who else does, and which sources are cited.
Be wary of in-house AI visibility scores without a published method. The number of answers naming your business on a known list of questions is simpler and you can check it.
What you get every week
We make sure AI assistants find consistent information about your business: on your site, in business directories and in articles on other websites. A good Google ranking helps with this, which is why every plan includes SEO as well.
Every week we ask the same questions from your list in the chosen engines and record whether your business appears, who appears alongside it and which sources the answer draws on. The report shows how that presence changes week by week.