What is AEO? AI SEO explained for local businesses
Your customers have started asking AI assistants for recommendations. Here’s how the answers get chosen, and how to make sure your business is in them.
Ask ChatGPT for “a good emergency plumber in Leeds” or let Google’s AI Overviews answer “best aesthetics clinic near me”, and you get something very different from ten blue links: a short answer naming a handful of specific businesses. There is no page two of an AI answer.
AEO, GEO, AI SEO: what’s the difference?
None worth arguing about. Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and AI SEO all describe the same discipline: optimising your business to be recommended in AI-generated answers. The label will settle eventually; the work is what matters.
How do AI assistants choose businesses?
AI systems compose answers from what they can read and verify across the web. In practice, a few signal groups dominate for local questions:
- Structured data: schema markup that spells out who you are, what you do, where you are, your opening hours and your FAQs, in a format machines parse reliably.
- Consistency: your name, address, phone and service claims matching everywhere: your site, Google Business Profile, directories, citations. Contradictions breed doubt, and doubtful businesses don’t get recommended.
- Answer-ready content: clear, factual passages that directly answer real questions. Assistants lift quotable blocks, not marketing waffle.
- Reviews and reputation: genuine review volume and sentiment across trusted platforms, the same prominence signals that drive the map pack.
- Crawlability: assistants can only cite what their crawlers can reach. Fast, clean, semantic sites with open access get read; bloated ones get skipped.
Why local businesses should care early
Local questions are exactly the kind people ask assistants: conversational, specific, urgent. And because the answers draw heavily on local signals you control, this is a game a well-optimised independent business can win against bigger names. The businesses that get their entity data and answers in shape now become the ones assistants keep recommending, and incumbency compounds.
What to do about it
Start with the foundations: if your local SEO is solid, you’re most of the way there, because the map pack and the assistants trust the same signals. Then layer on the AEO specifics: comprehensive schema, an honest FAQ page that answers real questions, consistent citations, and monitoring of what the assistants actually say about you.
That’s precisely what our AI SEO service does, as a fourth pillar on top of local SEO, not a replacement for it. If you’d like to know what the assistants currently say about your business, ask us on a discovery call: the audit is often eye-opening.
