SEO, AEO and GEO: getting found on Google, and inside the answer

Three readers, not one

For twenty years, being found online meant one thing: ranking well in Google's results. That still matters. But the person searching now meets your business in three different places, and each has its own reader deciding what to show.

The three overlap more than the acronyms suggest. Most of what helps one helps the others; the differences are in emphasis.

SEO: the foundation everything else stands on

Search engine optimisation is the oldest of the three and the base of the other two. Most of it is not about keywords. It is about whether a search engine can reach your pages, understand them and trust that they are worth showing.

That means a site that loads quickly, that answers missing pages with a proper not-found response rather than a blank success, that gives every page one clear title, a sensible heading structure and accurate metadata, and that tells search engines what it contains through a sitemap and structured data. These are decided when the site is built. They are much cheaper to get right then than to repair later.

• Speed — a slow page loses visitors and rankings alike.
• Crawlability — every page you want found can be reached, and every page that should not exist says so.
• Structure — one title per page, headings in order, content that says what the page is about.
• Structured data — machine-readable facts about your business, products, articles and services.

AEO: be the answer, not just a result

Answer engine optimisation is about the passage rather than the page. When someone asks a direct question, search engines and voice assistants try to show a direct answer — a highlighted snippet at the top of the results, or a sentence read aloud. That answer is lifted from someone's page. AEO is making it yours.

The rule is simple to state: answer the question immediately, in a self-contained paragraph that still makes sense when it is lifted out of the page. Then explain. A page that spends four paragraphs warming up before it answers has given the quote to somebody else.

One thing has changed here. Structured FAQ markup used to earn many sites an expanded listing in Google with questions showing underneath. Since 2023, Google shows that only for a small set of well-known authoritative sites. The markup still helps machines understand which question a passage answers — it is still worth having — but it is no longer a shortcut to a bigger listing.

This blog is written to that rule. Every post opens with a one-paragraph answer to its own title, a short list of points that stand on their own, and its questions answered at the end.

GEO: getting named inside an AI's answer

Generative engine optimisation is the newest of the three, and the one most people are asking about. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews which company to hire or how something works, the assistant writes its own answer — and often names the businesses and sources it drew on. GEO is about being one of them.

Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how each one chooses what to cite, and anyone promising a guaranteed method is guessing. But the pattern of what gets cited is consistent with what you would expect a careful researcher to trust: pages that answer specific questions clearly, state facts precisely, show who is saying them, and agree with what the rest of the web says about the same business.

• Be specific. "Physiotherapy clinics in Tampines, Yishun and Punggol" can be cited; "holistic wellness solutions" cannot.
• Be consistent. Your name, address, phone number and what you do should match everywhere they appear — your site, your Google Business Profile, directories.
• Show your work. Real case studies, real names, real numbers you can stand behind give a model something concrete to repeat.
• Stay current. Out-of-date prices, services and opening hours get repeated as confidently as current ones.

The local piece: your Google Business Profile

For a clinic, a shop, a training centre or any business people look for nearby, the Google Business Profile — the panel with your hours, photos, reviews and map pin — is often where the decision is made. A person searching for a physiotherapist near them may call straight from that panel without ever opening the website.

It needs the same care as the site: the right categories and services, accurate hours, real photos, regular posts and replies to reviews. A profile claimed once and left alone quietly falls behind the ones being kept current. We manage it for every client we run search for, because treating it as separate from SEO makes no sense.

What it is not

It is not a trick. There is no setting or file that makes an AI assistant recommend you. Some sites now publish a file called llms.txt to describe themselves to AI systems; it is a proposed convention rather than something the AI companies have committed to reading, so treat it as harmless rather than decisive.

And it is not a one-off. Search is a moving target — competitors publish, algorithms change, assistants appear. The foundation is built once; being found is kept up.

Where to start

If you do one thing this week, check whether your site answers the three or four questions your customers actually ask before they buy — in plain words, near the top of the relevant page. That single change helps all three kinds of search at once.

If you want to know where your site stands on the technical side, our free site audit runs a set of checks on any address and shows what needs attention. And when you want the whole of it done — the technical foundation, answer-ready content, your Google Business Profile, and reporting that shows what is working — that is our Search & AI Visibility service, measured through our own MW Analytics rather than guessed at.