SEO, AEO and GEO: What AI Search Means for Your Business

What’s changed in how people search

Search used to be a list you competed for a position in. Now, for a growing number of questions, there’s no list at all. Google generates an answer directly, or the person never opened Google in the first place.

Ahrefs tracked 300,000 keywords and found that when Google shows an AI Overview, the top-ranking page now loses up to 58% of the clicks it would previously have earned, comparing December 2025 data to before AI Overviews existed. That’s not a ranking problem you can fix with better keywords. It’s a structural change in where the click goes.

The knock-on effect for a small business is simple: someone can form an opinion of you, and rule you in or out, before your website is ever opened.

SEO, AEO and GEO: what each one actually means

Three acronyms are getting thrown around, and most explanations make them sound bigger and more complicated than they are.

SEO: Getting found in Google

Search engine optimisation is the discipline you already know: getting your pages to rank in Google and Bing’s results pages. It’s still the foundation. Nothing here replaces it.

AEO: Becoming the direct answer

Answer engine optimisation is about being the source Google pulls from when it writes a direct answer, a featured snippet, or a knowledge panel, without the person needing to click through at all. It’s SEO’s more concise cousin: clear, structured, answer-first content.

GEO: Getting recommended by AI

Generative engine optimisation is different again. It’s about whether tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity mention and recommend your business when someone asks a question in their own words. There’s no ranking position to fight for. There’s just: did the AI mention you, or didn’t it. 

The three overlap, but they’re not interchangeable. A page can rank well in Google (SEO), get pulled into an AI Overview (AEO), and still never be mentioned by ChatGPT (GEO), because each system is reading and weighing your content differently.

Why this matters for your business as much as a any other business

McKinsey’s research found that only 16% of brands currently track their AI search performance at all. Most of that stat gets quoted at big companies with marketing departments. It applies just as much to a sole trader with a WordPress site, because right now, almost nobody in your local market is paying attention to this either. That’s an opening, not a threat.

Google has also been direct about what actually matters here. In its own May 2026 guidance for AI search, Google confirmed that AEO and GEO aren’t a separate technical discipline requiring special files or markup, they’re still fundamentally about genuine, well-structured, useful content. That’s good news for a small business: this isn’t a new budget line, it’s doing SEO properly with AI in mind.

What Buzz Design has seen first-hand

Buzz Design hasn’t just written about this shift, we’ve built for it. Over recent months we’ve restructured our own site with AEO and GEO in mind, and we’re now seeing enquiries that started with new clients finding us directly through ChatGPT or Gemini rather than a Google search. 

The numbers back it up. Today, AI assistants account for 7.5% of Buzz Design’s own website traffic acquisition, and impressions from generative AI services have grown by almost 600% over the last 90 days alone. That’s not a projection. That’s what’s happening on our own site, right now, while most of the market isn’t watching for it.

What you can actually do about it

You don’t need a five-person marketing team or a weekly tracking spreadsheet across five AI platforms to make progress here. For a small business, three things matter most: 

1. Write content that answers real questions directly, in plain language, near the top of the page, not buried three paragraphs in.
2. Keep your business information, services and location consistent everywhere you appear online, your own site, Google Business Profile, directories, because AI tools cross-reference all of it.
3. And make sure your site’s technical foundations, speed, crawlability, clean structure, are solid, since AI systems need to read your content before they can recommend it. 

None of this replaces good SEO. It builds on it.