AEO vs SEO: What Actually Changes When AI Answers the Question

Traditional SEO is built around ranking a page in a list of links. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) are built around a different question entirely: when an AI system answers a query directly, does it know your business exists — and does it trust the entity enough to cite it?

That shift changes the actual engineering work. Schema markup and entity clarity stop being a nice-to-have and become the thing AI assistants and voice search parse to understand who you are. Structured Q&A content stops being blog filler and becomes the raw material AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity pull from when they're deciding what to cite.

Most local businesses are lightly optimised for classic Google and almost entirely absent from the AI layer. That gap is where we spend most of our search engineering time — not because traditional SEO stopped mattering, but because it stopped being the whole picture.