Four acronyms, one question
AEO (answer engine optimization), GEO (generative engine optimization), LLM SEO, AI SEO — the marketing industry is speed-running its favorite move: renaming a discipline so it can be resold. Strip the branding and every one of these means the same thing: when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Google's AI for a recommendation, does your business get named in the answer?
That question matters because AI answers have no page two. A traditional search result gives you ten chances to be seen; an assistant's recommendation names two or three businesses and moves on. You're cited or you're invisible — and a real, growing slice of local buying decisions now starts exactly there. One of our clients had a customer say it to their face, unprompted: 'I found you on ChatGPT.'
How AI systems actually pick businesses
There's no secret AI ranking algorithm to hack, but the mechanics aren't mysterious either. Assistants pull from a few knowable places: their training data, live web search (ChatGPT's browsing runs substantially on Bing's index), and the structured information they can parse from your site and profiles. A business becomes recommendable when machines can crawl it, identify it unambiguously, verify what it does and where, and find content worth quoting.
That translates to concrete work: crawler access for the AI bots (many sites block them without realizing), fast pages that render without a JavaScript fight, structured data that states facts machines can trust, consistent name-location-service data everywhere an assistant might look, direct answers to the questions people actually ask, and presence in Bing's index — which most local businesses ignore completely because 'nobody uses Bing.' ChatGPT does.
The snake oil detector
Because the terms are new, the grift is thick. Red flags: anyone guaranteeing placement in ChatGPT answers (impossible, same as guaranteeing Google rankings), proprietary 'GEO scores' with no methodology, AI optimization sold as a replacement for SEO rather than an extension of it, and monthly retainers for what is mostly one-time structural work plus maintenance.
The truth is less sexy and more useful: AI visibility is built on the same foundation as strong technical SEO — which means if someone did your SEO right, you're most of the way there, and if an agency is selling you AEO on top of a slow template site, they're selling a roof for a house with no walls.
What we actually do about it
Every site we build ships AI-ready by default: welcome rules for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and the rest, full schema graphs, static pages any crawler can read, and an llms.txt file — a curated manifest that hands assistants accurate facts in the format they parse best. On top of that we run IndexNow, which pushes every site update into Bing within minutes, and keep business entity data consistent across Google, Bing, and Apple.
Is AI search going to replace Google tomorrow? No. Is it already producing real customers for businesses that happen to be readable while their competitors aren't? We have the text message that says yes. Early channels reward early movers — and this one costs almost nothing extra when the foundation is built right in the first place.