AEO and GEO: how a small business gets named in AI answers
AEO and GEO mean making your business easy for AI assistants and search answer boxes to understand and quote: clear answers on your pages, the same facts everywhere, and markup that says who you are. No one can promise a ranking or a citation, so the honest work is to be accurate, specific and consistent, and then measure.
What the two terms mean
SEO is about ranking in a list of links. AEO is about being the direct answer a search box or voice assistant shows. GEO is about being named when a generative assistant writes a response. They share most of their work.
Steps that help
- Open each page with a two-sentence answer to the question the page is about.
- Write real FAQs that you also print on the page, and mark them up so machines can read them.
- Keep your name, address, phone, hours and services identical on your site, Google Business Profile and other listings.
- Say who you are with structured data: your organisation, your services and your sameAs profile links.
- Cite primary sources, and date what you publish and update.
- Let crawlers in on purpose: check your robots file and any bot-blocking setting at your host or CDN.
Claims to treat with care
An llms.txt file is a plain-text summary some people publish for AI assistants. No major engine has confirmed that it uses one, so treat it as cheap and unproven. FAQ markup rarely produces a rich result for a small site anymore; it still helps machines read the page. Anyone selling a guaranteed number-one rank or guaranteed AI mention is selling something that no one controls.
How to measure
Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap. Then ask twenty questions a buyer would ask in several assistants each month and write down whether you are named and what is said about you.
Questions people ask
Is AEO different from SEO?
They overlap heavily. SEO aims at ranking links, AEO at being the direct answer, and GEO at being cited by generative assistants. Clear, accurate, well-structured pages help all three.
Does llms.txt work?
It is unproven. No major engine has confirmed that it reads the file. It costs little to publish, so some sites do, but do not expect results from it alone.
Can I pay to be recommended by an AI assistant?
Not through any official route we know of. Be wary of anyone who says they can guarantee it.
How does Woro AI help?
Woro AI builds sites and an on-page pack with titles, descriptions, FAQ markup, a sitemap and an llms.txt file, written from the business's own facts. It cannot promise a ranking.
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