Traditional SEO optimizes for Google's ranking algorithm: keywords, links, page speed, and a hundred technical signals that decide where you land in a list of ten blue links. It still matters. But it is no longer the whole game.
What AEO is
AEO is AI search optimization, sometimes called GEO, generative engine optimization. It is about structuring your content so language models can retrieve it, parse it, and confidently cite it when someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity for a recommendation. The AI does not show ten links. It names a few specific businesses, and you want to be one of them.
Why it matters now
A growing share of customers ask an AI assistant before they ever open Google, and the ones who do tend to act on the answer. If you are not in that short list of names, the customer never learns you exist. The field is not crowded yet, which is exactly why getting in early is worth so much.
What actually moves the needle
- Clean schema markup, so the facts about your business are machine-readable
- Clear, factual statements an AI can quote without guessing
- The questions your customers actually ask, answered on your own pages
- A site built in code an AI can read, not a page builder that buries your content
SEO and AEO overlap, but they are not the same work, and most agencies are not doing the AEO half yet. The free audit on this site checks how you currently show up in both, and tells you what to fix first.