Guide

What Is GEO and AEO? A Plain-English Guide

More people are asking ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews or Perplexity a question directly, instead of typing a search term and clicking through a list of links. GEO and AEO are the two disciplines about making sure your business gets found — and represented accurately — when that happens.

GEO: generative engine optimization

GEO is about structuring content so an AI system that generates an answer (rather than just listing links) can read your page correctly and represent it accurately in that answer. In practice, that means:

• Clean, accurate structured data (schema markup) — the machine-readable version of "this is a business, here's what it does, here's where it operates"
• Content that states facts plainly and directly, rather than burying the actual answer under marketing preamble
• Pages that are fast and technically clean enough for an AI crawler to parse reliably

AEO: answer engine optimization

AEO is narrower and more tactical: writing and marking up content so a specific question gets a specific, correct, quotable answer. If someone asks "what does redundancy pay entitle me to" or "what's the average cost of a website in the UK," AEO is making sure your page has a clear, direct paragraph that actually answers that — not a page that's technically relevant but never states the answer plainly.

Do these replace SEO?

No — they build on it. A page that's slow, badly structured, or thin on genuine content won't do well in GEO or AEO any more than it does in traditional search. Most of what makes GEO/AEO work is SEO fundamentals done properly: fast pages, clear structure, real expertise, accurate structured data. The difference is intent — you're now also writing and marking up content with "will an AI system quote this correctly" as an explicit goal, not just "will this rank."

What this looks like in practice

On this site alone: FAQ schema on our pricing page so a specific pricing question can be answered directly; Article and BreadcrumbList schema on these guides; an Organization/ProfessionalService schema on every page stating exactly what we are, where we operate, and how to contact us. It's not complicated — it's just done consistently, everywhere, rather than as a one-off audit.

We apply the same practice across the nine platforms we operate ourselves, which is where we test what actually moves the needle before recommending it to a client.

Want GEO and AEO built into your site from the start, not bolted on later? Get in touch for a free quote — or see the full breakdown on our services page.