Blog
AEO is not SEO with a new name, and treating it like one is already costing you customers
A growing share of people asking "who does X near me" are not typing it into Google. They are asking ChatGPT, or Perplexity, or whatever is built into their phone, and getting a short answer with two or three names in it. If your business is not one of the names, it does not matter how well you rank on page one of search, because she never opened search.
6 minute read
Ranking and being recommended are not the same skill
Search engine optimisation is built around ranking a page for a query. Answer engine optimisation is built around being the confident, correctly-attributed answer an AI model gives when someone asks a question in plain language. The inputs overlap, but they are not the same target.
An AI model pulling together an answer weighs consistency of information about you across the web, clear structured facts (what you do, where, for whom, at what price), and being mentioned by other sources it already trusts. Keyword density and backlinks matter less here than being unambiguous everywhere you already appear.
Where this actually breaks for small businesses
Your business name spelled three different ways across your website, your Google profile and your social bios. Prices missing everywhere, so a model summarising you has nothing concrete to repeat. A Google Business Profile that has not been touched since you opened, while your actual hours and services live only in a caption from eight months ago.
None of that is a search-engine problem in the old sense. It is a consistency and clarity problem, and it is exactly what an answer engine trips over first.
What I actually check for this
The same name, the same category, the same one-sentence description of what you do, everywhere a model might read about you. Prices or ranges stated somewhere public. Recent, structured information rather than a paragraph written once and never revisited.
It is less glamorous than "AEO strategy" as a phrase suggests. It is mostly cleanup, done properly, once.
In practice
- Say what you do, for whom, and where in the same words on your site, your Google profile, and your bios
- Put a price or a range somewhere public, even a range
- Update your Google Business Profile like it is read more often than your homepage, because it is