Answer guide
What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the practice of making your business the answer AI engines actually give, rather than just a link they might rank. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI "who's the best plumber near me?", GEO is the work that gets your name into that answer: verifiable facts, quotable content, and citations engines can cross-check.
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO earns a position in a list of links; GEO earns a mention in a generated answer. SEO optimizes for crawlers and ranking factors. GEO optimizes for being quotable: direct answers, consistent entity facts, structured data, and third-party citations an AI can cross-check. The practical difference shows up in what wins — an AI answer names one or two businesses, not ten.
What is AEO, and where does it fit?
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — is the content layer: structuring pages so an engine can lift a complete answer from them, using question headings, 40-to-60-word direct answers, and FAQ or Speakable schema. GEO includes AEO and adds the entity and citation layers around it. RankOps treats all three — SEO, AEO, GEO — as one system, because engines read one site.
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. Google still drives enormous traffic, and classic search health remains the foundation — AI engines read the same site. GEO extends SEO to the engines that answer instead of rank. A business needs both, in one system.
What should a local business actually do?
- Measure first. Find out whether AI readers can even parse your site — the free score check does this in two minutes.
- Fix the machine-readable facts. Business schema, consistent name-address-phone, a clear answer to "who is this and where."
- Answer real questions on your site, first sentence first, with FAQ schema.
- Get cited where engines check — the directories and sources they cross-reference.
- Track the answers monthly. Visibility you don't measure quietly disappears. See the full method.