SEO, AEO and GEO are overlapping ways of helping people and machines find your website. For a business, the useful question is what changes on the site and how you will judge the result.
A short answer
SEO helps search engines discover and understand pages. AEO focuses on answering specific questions clearly. GEO concerns how a brand and its information appear in generative answers. None guarantees a ranking or citation.
Start with access
A valuable page is of little use to search if a crawler cannot access it, the page is marked noindex or its canonical address points elsewhere. Check this before you commission more articles.
Put important information in HTML text. Use descriptive links and a logical page hierarchy. A visitor should not need to open a chat widget to learn what a service includes.
Write answers with enough context
A useful answer names the subject, states the answer and explains conditions. For example, a website delivery estimate should say what scope it covers and what inputs it depends on. A bare number without context may be easy to quote and still be misleading.
Keep names, services and contact information consistent. Show who wrote a material and link to sources for factual claims. Structured data should describe the visible content accurately.
Avoid a technical shortcut mentality
Google explicitly says its AI search features do not need new AI text files or special schema. Good SEO and useful content remain the foundation. An llms.txt file can serve as a concise directory, but it is not evidence that a model will read or cite a site.
Measure separate outcomes
Search impressions, clicks, enquiries and AI citations are different observations. Track them separately. An occasional citation is not proof of a stable channel, and a high technical score does not prove that sales increased.
For a practical starting point, review the SEO service or check your website.
Sources
A measurement record you can reuse
| Layer | Record | What it does not establish |
|---|---|---|
| Technical access | URL, response status, robots and canonical, check date | Inclusion in a search index |
| Search performance | Query, page, country, period, impressions and clicks from Search Console | Sales or citation in a specific AI answer |
| AI answer | Engine, exact question, language, date, mention and cited URL | Stable visibility across other queries or users |
| Business outcome | Received enquiries and agreed attribution method | That every change came from SEO |
Keep an empty field when evidence is unavailable; do not replace it with zero. Repeat the same query set under recorded conditions before comparing AI answers. A technical score is not an AI visibility score. If visits arrive but enquiries do not, use the enquiry diagnostic checklist.