If you run a business, someone has probably told you you’re behind on AEO and GEO. Answer Engine Optimization. Generative Engine Optimization. New acronyms, new service packages, new monthly retainers, and a new reason to worry that ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews are about to make you invisible.
Here’s my take: AEO and GEO are bullshit.
AI search is real, and it’s changing how people find businesses. But AEO and GEO are the same thing SEO always was, dressed up in new letters. And if you’ve been chasing SEO the way most of the industry sells it, you were already chasing the wrong thing.
Plenty of good marketers already work the way I’m about to describe. The problem is how the work gets packaged and sold.
I’ve Been Saying This About SEO for Years
I’ve told clients the same thing about SEO for as long as I’ve been building websites. It always gets their attention, which is the point. But there’s more to it.
When most people say they want SEO, what they really mean is they want to rank. And the way ranking usually gets sold is by bending a website into whatever shape an algorithm supposedly wants: stuff in the keywords, spin up a pile of thin pages for every town and service combination, chase whatever tactic worked last quarter.
That’s the part I call bullshit. It treats your website like something you build for a robot. Your website is for your customers. Get that right and most of what people call SEO takes care of itself.
Follow the Money: Why Google Ranks Websites at All
To understand where search is going, you have to understand why it exists.
Google makes most of its money from ads (about 73% of Alphabet’s revenue in 2025). Advertisers want to be where the people are. And people only keep using Google if they trust the results and actually find what they’re looking for. The day the results stop being useful is the day people go somewhere else, and the advertisers follow them.
So every algorithm update Google has ever made, and every one it’ll make in the future, is built to do the same job: find the best websites and show them to people asking questions. AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, whatever comes next. They all have the same incentive. Give the person a great answer or lose them.
Google says this pretty directly. Its own guidance on AI features says the same SEO best practices apply, and that there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to show up in AI Overviews or AI Mode.
If you’ve been trying to reverse engineer the algorithm, you’ve been trying to outsmart a company whose entire business depends on making sure you can’t.
Part 1: Earn the Right to Be Shown
Before Google ranks you, it decides whether you’re worth showing at all. That decision comes down to one question: does your site actually help the person who’s searching?
That means:
- Your site answers the questions your customers are really asking. What you do, what it costs, where you are, how it works, why they should pick you. Plainly, on the page.
- Your content is original. Written from what you actually know about your business and your customers, not rewritten from the top five search results.
- Your navigation makes sense. A visitor finds what they need in a click or two without having to think about it.
- Every page earns its spot. You don’t need fifty near-identical pages chasing keyword variations. You need the right pages, each one useful.
This is the work that lasts. It worked before AI search, it works now, and it’ll keep working through whatever comes next, because it’s exactly what every search engine is trying to reward.
It’s also the part most SEO packages skip, because it can’t be done from a checklist. It takes understanding the business and the people it serves.
This is the same whether you’re a dentist, a contractor or a restaurant. The questions change. The job doesn’t.
Part 2: The Technical Work (This Is What SEO, AEO and GEO Actually Are)
Once the site is great, there’s real technical work to do. This is the part I take seriously, and it’s what every one of these acronyms boils down to: making sure search engines and AI tools can find your site, read it, and understand it.
Can they find it?
- Your robots.txt isn’t blocking search engines, or the AI crawlers you want reading your site
- An XML sitemap that’s complete, current, and submitted in Google Search Console
- Indexing checked and monitored in Search Console, so you catch problems early
- Smart internal linking, so every important page is reachable
- No broken links or long redirect chains
Can they read it?
- Semantic HTML, so the code describes what the content actually is
- A proper heading structure: one H1 per page, then H2s and H3s in a logical order
- Your important content in the page’s HTML. Google can render JavaScript, but most AI crawlers, including the ones behind ChatGPT and Claude, don’t, so content that only loads through scripts can be invisible to them
- Descriptive alt text on images
- Canonical tags, so duplicate versions of a page don’t compete with each other
Can they understand it and present it well?
- A unique, accurate title tag on every page
- Meta descriptions written for people, since they’re often your search snippet
- Open Graph tags, so your links look right when they’re shared on social or in a text
- Structured data (schema) that describes your business, your services and your articles, and matches what’s actually on the page. Google says there’s no special schema you need to add for its AI features.
Is it a good experience?
- Fast load times (Google measures this with Core Web Vitals)
- Fully mobile-friendly
- HTTPS everywhere
Look at what’s on this list. Nothing here is a trick, and there’s no secret AEO step. Google says there are no additional technical requirements for its AI features beyond normal search eligibility. A couple of items, like letting AI crawlers in and keeping your content readable without JavaScript, matter a little more now. That’s the whole difference.
You don’t need to do any of this yourself. You need to know someone is doing it.
It’s housekeeping. Important housekeeping, but it’s only worth something once the site underneath it is worth showing.
Part 3: Your Reputation Does the Ranking
Here’s where I’ll lose some of the SEO crowd. Ranking mostly isn’t something you do to your website. Once your site is good enough to be shown, where you land comes down to something much harder to fake: the real-world reputation and authority of your business.
That comes from:
- Your Google Business Profile. Complete, accurate, and active, with real photos and current hours.
- Reviews. Lots of real ones, recent ones, and responses to them, shown accurately on your site and your listings.
- Consistent listings. The same business name, address, and phone number everywhere you show up online.
- The right directories. The ones that actually matter in your industry and your area, not a thousand spammy ones.
- People talking about you. Press, partnerships, community involvement, sponsorships, and links from real sites that know who you are.
Google says it plainly: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.” What it does say helps is more reviews, positive ratings, and links from other websites.
In a competitive space, this is where the real fight happens, and there’s no shortcut. It takes time, often money, and most of all a business that does a great job in the real world. You can’t optimize your way into a reputation. You earn it, then make sure the internet can see it.
Playing the Long Game
Every couple of years there’s a new acronym and a new wave of agencies selling it. Before AEO and GEO, it was voice search, featured snippets, FAQ schema, and a string of Google updates with animal names like Panda and Penguin. FAQ schema was sold as a must-have for years. In May 2026, Google stopped showing it. Some of those changes were real. But the businesses with great websites, real reputations and clean technical foundations barely had to adjust.
That’s how I approach every client at Flip Creative. I don’t run businesses through a cookie-cutter SEO package. I start with your business and your customers, build a site that serves them, get the technical foundation right, and help you build the reputation that does the actual ranking.
It’s less flashy than a new acronym. It’s also the only approach that doesn’t need to be reinvented every time Google or OpenAI ships something new.
If you want an honest look at where your site stands, let's talk.