AEO vs GEO: What the Acronyms Mean for a Local Business
Every few months the industry coins a new acronym and clients start asking whether they need it. AEO and GEO arrived together, are used interchangeably by half the people using them, and mean slightly different things. This is the explanation to have ready when a client forwards a LinkedIn post and asks if you are doing it.
What AEO means
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. An answer engine is anything that tries to give one answer instead of ten links: Google's featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes, voice assistants, and now Google AI Overviews at the top of the results page.
Optimising for it means structuring content so it can be lifted out as the answer: a clear question as a heading, a direct answer in the first sentence under it, facts stated rather than implied, and schema markup so the engine knows what kind of page it is looking at. AEO is older than the current AI wave; agencies were doing it for featured snippets in 2018. AI Overviews gave it a second life.
What GEO means
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. A generative engine is an assistant that writes its answer: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot. It does not show a snippet from your page; it reads many pages, decides what is true, and composes a reply that may or may not name you.
Optimising for it is less about page structure and more about being a source the engines trust and can describe. Consistent facts about the business across the web, clear statements of what it does and where, third-party mentions and reviews that corroborate it, and content that answers the questions people actually ask an assistant.
Where they differ
The difference is where the answer comes from. An answer engine quotes a page. A generative engine synthesises from many, and often from sources you do not control: directories, review sites, news, forums.
So AEO is mostly on-page work with a measurable target (did we win the snippet, are we in the Overview). GEO is mostly off-page and entity work with a fuzzier target (are we named, and how often). For a national brand with a content team these can be separate programmes. For a local business they are not.
Why the distinction barely matters locally
Ask any of the four assistants for a plumber in Leeds and watch what they do. They look for businesses that exist as clear entities: a Google Business Profile with the right category, a website that says "emergency plumber" and "Leeds" in plain text, reviews that mention the service, the same name, address and phone number everywhere. Then they name two or three.
That is the same list a local SEO audit has always produced. The engines are not reading structured data on your client's site and lifting an answer; they are deciding whether the business is a credible, well-described answer to a local question. AEO tactics help the Google AI Overview part. GEO tactics help the ChatGPT part. Both come down to the same four things for a local business.
The four things that move the answer
Category and description. The primary category on the Google Business Profile and the first sentence of the website must say the service the customer would ask for. Assistants take the business at its word; a "contractor" is not offered to someone asking for a plumber.
One page per service, one page per area. A single homepage that lists twelve services is hard for an engine to summarise. A page that says "boiler repair in Headingley" is easy to cite when someone asks for exactly that.
Consistent facts everywhere. Name, address, phone and opening hours identical on the profile, the website, Yell, Checkatrade and wherever else the business appears. Engines cross-check; inconsistency reads as uncertainty.
Recent, specific reviews. Reviews that mention the service and the town ("fixed our boiler in Chapel Allerton the same day") are evidence the engines can use. Star ratings alone are not.
None of this is new. What is new is that a client can now open ChatGPT, ask for their own trade in their own town, and see whether they are named. They will do that whether or not you report it.
How to report it
Check monthly. Ask each assistant the two or three questions that bring the client customers, record whether the business is named, how it is described, and which competitors are named instead. Put it in the report next to the Google Maps grid, because the two move together and the client understands the map.
In our study of 500 UK local businesses in the Google Maps top 10, 26 percent were ever named by an AI assistant. The ones that were had the four things above. That is the pitch, and it is the same work you already sell: the acronym is new, the deliverable is not.
LocalPulse checks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews for every client property every month and puts the answer in the white-label report at no extra cost. See the AI visibility tracker or the full UK study.
Related: local rank tracker · white-label SEO report tool · AI visibility tracker · free Google Maps rank checker