Here’s something worth sitting with for a moment.
Right now, someone could open ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI search and type: “Who’s a good [insert your job title] in [insert your city]?”
And within seconds, they’d get an answer. A confident, well-structured, conversational answer. This isn’t happening in some distant tech-forward future, it’s happening now, across every market, in every language, on every continent.
The question is: Are you in that answer?
This is the new reality of search. And most businesses, whether they’re based in Birmingham, Brisbane, or Boston, are still playing by the old rules.
To the basics: What are SEO, AEO, and GEO and why do all three matter?
You’ve probably heard of SEO ( Search Engine Optimisation). It’s been around for decades and at its core it’s fairly simple:
Make sure Google can find your website, rank it well, and send people to it. Think of it as getting your name in the directory and as high up the list as possible.
AEO and GEO are newer, and they work differently although the three are more complementary than they are competing.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is about structuring your content so that AI tools and voice assistants can pull a direct answer from it. When someone asks a question and a clean, quoted response appears at the top of the page without them ever clicking a link, that’s AEO doing its job. The goal isn’t to drive traffic to your site. It’s to be the answer.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) goes a step further. It’s about crafting authoritative, well-structured content that AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity draw from when they’re generating responses. When an AI pulls together a summary from multiple sources, GEO is what determines whether your expertise, your insight, or your brand name is one of those sources.
Put simply: SEO gets you ranked. AEO gets you quoted. GEO gets you trusted. You want all three, but most businesses don’t yet have any strategy for the latter two.
Why does this matter for businesses?
Nearly a third of the US population will use generative AI search in 2026, and the rest of the world is following fast. In the UK, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and beyond, the way people find information and find businesses is shifting at pace. People are no longer just typing keywords and scrolling through links. They’re asking questions, in plain language, and expecting a direct, synthesised answer back.
That shift changes everything about how you need to show up online. And it doesn’t respect geography. A buyer in Singapore researching a UK professional services firm, a client in New York looking for a logistics partner in Manchester, a founder in Dubai comparing consultants are all using the same AI tools, getting the same kind of AI-generated responses.
If your business isn’t structured to appear in those responses, you’re invisible to them before the conversation even starts.
Google changed the game, did your business notice?
Google has just updated its AI Overviews to include perspectives pulled directly from public online discussions, social media, and other firsthand sources. This means Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, and forum conversations are now feeding directly into what Google serves as an answer. And Google has now made it official: AEO and GEO aren’t separate disciplines; optimising for generative AI search is still SEO, rooted in the same core ranking and quality systems. The good news is that the tactics being sold as AI search “must-dos” such as chunking content, creating llms.txt files, chasing inauthentic mentions, adding special schema markup, can all be ignored. What Google actually rewards is unique, non-commodity content: the kind that brings a genuine expert perspective rather than recycling what everyone else has already said. For businesses with no presence beyond their own website, that’s where the real problem lies.
With no firsthand voice in the places Google is now listening (forums, social platforms, online discussions) a lot of hard SEO work becomes invisible. Rankings can appear stable and impressions remain flat, yet clicks and organic traffic will quietly decline, and many businesses still don’t know why. The simple answer is that Google is increasingly answering the question itself. Research shows 60% of searches now end without a single click. But the upside is real: sites cited within AI Overviews can see click-through rates increase by up to 35%. The difference between being summarised without credit and being named as the source comes down to one thing: creating content with a distinct, credible, human point of view. That’s always been good SEO. Now it’s the whole game.
Where are businesses getting their AI search strategy wrong?
Most are still building content for the old approach including long pages, keyword-heavy, designed to rank on Google, while AI tools quietly bypass those pages entirely and pull answers from cleaner, more authoritative sources. The older approach is just simply no longer enough on its own.
The other common mistake is treating this as a purely technical problem. Schema markup and structured data matter, but AI engines draw heavily from social platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube, which, as mentioned, means a business with no presence or voice beyond its own website is likely being overlooked entirely. For international audiences especially, this matters. AI doesn’t have a local bias the way a regional Google search might. It draws from wherever the credible, well-structured content lives. If that content isn’t yours, it’ll be someone else’s.
There’s also a visibility trap that catches people off guard. Being referenced by an AI doesn’t always mean being clicked. Even major publishers receive less than 1% of referral traffic from AI platforms despite being frequently cited. Brand visibility and website traffic are increasingly separate metrics. Your strategy needs to account for both.
What does a good AI search strategy actually look like?
The businesses getting this right share a few common habits. They write content that answers real questions directly. Taking the approach of using simple language and expertise that a smart, busy person (or an AI summarising for one) can extract value from immediately, rather than complicated corporate jargon, increases the likelihood of your content being shared.
The first sentence of any page or section should answer the primary question completely, because that’s what AI pulls from. Every section should be able to stand alone.
They’re also active on the platforms AI trusts. LinkedIn, industry publications, forums, YouTube aren’t just marketing channels anymore, they’re the sources AI is trained to reference. For businesses with global reach or international ambitions, this is especially important: appearing on platforms with cross-border credibility signals to AI tools that you’re a source worth citing wherever the question is being asked.
Further these businesses think about search intent differently. Instead of asking “what keywords do people type?”, they ask “what would someone say to an AI assistant when they need what I offer?” Those are often very different questions and the businesses writing content that answers the second one are quietly pulling ahead.
The bottom line
The AI is already forming opinions about businesses in your sector. It’s recommending some and overlooking others often before a potential client has visited a single website, made a single call, or sent a single email. This is occurring whether your market is local, national, or international.
The businesses that will win the next five years aren’t necessarily the biggest or the best-established. They’re the ones showing up clearly, consistently, and credibly in all the places AI goes to learn.
The question isn’t whether to adapt. It’s whether you do it before your competitors do.
