Found when they search.
Cited when they ask.

SEO gets you ranked in a list of links. AEO gets your answer extracted into a featured snippet, voice result or People Also Ask box. GEO gets you cited as a source inside an AI-generated answer. They are three different surfaces on the same search, and the work overlaps heavily — most of AEO and GEO is good SEO with tighter formatting discipline and information worth quoting.

No, but the scoreboard changed. Informational searches produce fewer clicks because the answer sits at the top of the page, so judging SEO purely on sessions will make good work look like failure. What has not changed is that buying-intent searches still click, and that AI answers have to cite somebody — being that source is worth more than a tenth blue link ever was.

Technical fixes can show up in weeks. Content and authority realistically take three to six months to move competitive terms, longer in crowded categories. Anyone promising page-one rankings in thirty days is either targeting terms nobody searches or about to do something that gets you penalised.

Publish something only you can publish, structure it so a machine can extract it cleanly, and be a consistent entity across the web. Assistants cite sources they can identify and verify, so the same business name, address and facts everywhere matters more than it used to. There is no way to buy a citation, and anyone selling one is guessing.

You need pages that answer what buyers ask, which is often service and category pages rather than a blog. Publishing weekly articles nobody searches for is the most common wasted SEO budget we see. Six pages that answer the six questions you get on the phone will usually outperform sixty generic posts.

Yes, and it is cheap. Schema tells search engines and AI systems what your page is instead of leaving them to infer it, and it is a precondition for several rich results. It takes an afternoon on most sites. This page ships fourteen schema types — you can view source and check.

Usually, and we will tell you honestly if the platform is the ceiling. Some page builders generate markup so heavy that no amount of optimisation gets the Core Web Vitals green, and in those cases the right recommendation is a rebuild rather than a retainer that cannot deliver.

Mostly Google Business Profile: complete categories, real photos, posts, and a steady flow of reviews with replies. Then consistent name, address and phone details everywhere you are listed, and location pages with genuine content rather than the same paragraph with the city swapped. For a business serving a specific area, this beats national SEO effort almost every time.