August 2026
You don’t need to know what AEO means
There is a video going around explaining SEO, AIO, GEO and AEO. Four acronyms. The conclusion, after twelve minutes, is that they are all basically the same thing. He is right, and it is worth explaining why that matters to you.
There is a good chance somebody has already tried to sell you the difference.
Here is the whole thing in one line. People find your shop by searching. Sometimes they search on Google. Now they also ask ChatGPT. The job is to make sure that when they do, your business is the answer.
That is it. That is the entire industry.
What the four words actually mean
SEO is showing up on Google. Someone types “smoke shop near me” and you are in the results.
AEO is showing up in the little box at the top with the direct answer. Someone asks what time smoke shops close and Google pulls the answer straight off your page.
AIO is ChatGPT knowing you exist at all.
GEO is ChatGPT actually mentioning you when someone asks it to compare their options.
Four names. One job: be the business that comes back when somebody asks.
Why they invented four words for one thing
Because you can charge for four things.
I will be straight with you. I have seen agencies add “AI Optimization” to an invoice as its own line at a few hundred a month. What they are describing is the work that was already in the price. Google has said publicly that its AI answers run on ordinary search ranking. There is no separate switch. There is no AI button.
So when someone quotes you for SEO and then quotes you again for AEO, they are charging you twice for the same afternoon.
What actually changed
I do not want to pretend nothing is different, because two things genuinely are.
Assistants read your information rather than counting your links. The old game was mostly about who links to you. ChatGPT is reading what is actually on your page. So your hours being right matters more than it used to. Your address matching everywhere matters more. Having a real answer to a real question matters more than having the phrase repeated eight times.
And for a local shop, your Google Business Profile does most of the work. When somebody asks an assistant for a store near them, it is leaning on the same business listing Google uses. Hours, category, reviews, photos. Not your blog. Your listing.
Which is why we spend most of our time on the listing.
What we do about it
All of this is in the price. Not as a bonus, and not as a line item. Every site we build ships with:
- Your business details in a format machines can read: address, hours, phone.
- Your questions and answers labelled so an assistant can quote them.
- A plain-text summary of your business written for AI tools.
- Permission for the assistants to read your site at all, which more sites block by accident than you would think.
- Your pages announced to Bing the day they go live, because that is the index ChatGPT has been leaning on.
We check all five on every build. If a page fails, it does not go out.
What I would tell you sitting across from you
If somebody is selling you AI optimization as an extra, ask them one question: what specifically are you doing that you were not already doing for the SEO I am paying for?
If the answer is schema, FAQs and accurate business information, that is the SEO. You are being billed twice. And if they cannot answer it plainly, that tells you something too.
The fundamentals have not moved. Be findable. Be accurate. Answer the question somebody actually asked. The rest is people making a simple job sound complicated so it is harder to price.