Most business owners I speak to have heard of SEO. Fewer have heard of AEO, and the ones who have usually ask me the same thing: is this something new I need to pay for, or is it just SEO with a different name? The answer is a bit of both. This post explains what each one is, where they overlap, and what you can do about them without spending a fortune.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It's the work of making your website easy for Google and Bing to understand, so they show it to people who are searching for what you sell.
When someone types "plumber near me" or "web design Leicester", Google picks a handful of pages out of millions and puts them in order. SEO is about giving your pages a fair chance of being in that list, ideally near the top, because most people click one of the first few results and never look further.
In practice it comes down to a few things:
- Pages that clearly say what you do and where you do it, using the words your customers search for
- A site that loads quickly and works properly on a phone
- Technical basics such as page titles, headings, a sitemap and clean URLs
- Reviews, a Google Business Profile and links from other websites, which show Google that other people trust you
If you mainly serve customers nearby, local SEO is the part to focus on. That's mostly your Google Business Profile, your reviews and proper pages for the towns you cover. There's more on that on our local SEO page.
What is AEO?
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. An answer engine is any tool that replies to a question with an answer instead of a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and the AI Overviews at the top of many Google results all work this way.
People now ask these tools things like "who's a good electrician in Hinckley?" or "how much should a small business website cost?". The tool reads pages from around the web, writes a short answer, and sometimes names or links to the businesses it took the information from. AEO is the work of making your business one of the ones it names.
You'll also see it called GEO (generative engine optimisation) or AI search optimisation. They mean roughly the same thing, and nobody has settled on one name yet.
SEO vs AEO: what's the difference?
The biggest difference is what counts as a win. With SEO, success is a click: someone sees your page in the results and visits your site. With AEO, the person might never visit your site at all. Success is being mentioned in the answer, or being the source it links to, so that when they're ready to buy they already know your name.
How you get there differs a little too. Google ranks whole pages. An AI tool tends to lift out a single paragraph or sentence that answers the question, so it favours content that gets to the point. A page that buries the answer under three paragraphs of introduction can still rank in Google, but it's less likely to be quoted.
The overlap is large, though. Answer engines still have to find your pages, and many of them lean on ordinary search indexes to do it. If Google can't crawl your site or doesn't trust it, an AI tool built on top of search results probably won't pick it up either. That's why I'd never treat AEO as a replacement for SEO. It sits on top of it.
How SEO and AEO help your business
People look for local services online before they pick up the phone. If you're not there when they look, the enquiry goes to whoever is.
Good SEO brings in people who are already looking for what you do. Someone searching "emergency boiler repair Loughborough" isn't browsing. They want to hire someone today. Showing up for searches like that is worth far more than general visibility, and unlike paid ads, you don't pay every time someone clicks.
AEO helps earlier on. When a customer asks an AI tool to compare options or explain what they should expect to pay, the businesses it mentions get a head start on trust before anyone has opened a website. For a small business that's a chance to be named next to much bigger firms, as long as your information is clear and easy to check.
Most of the work overlaps anyway. Clear service pages, honest pricing and straight answers to common questions help with both, and they make the site more useful to the person reading it, which is the reason you have a website in the first place.
What you can do to improve your SEO and AEO
You don't need to do all of this at once. Start at the top and work down.
Get the basics right first
Make sure your site loads quickly, works on a phone, and has a clear title and main heading on every page. Our free website speed checker will show you how your site is doing.
Put your main keyword in the right places
Pick the phrase you most want a page to be found for, then make sure it appears in four places: the page URL, the page title, the main heading (the H1) and the first paragraph. Google gives those spots a lot of weight when it works out what a page is about, so this is one of the easiest wins in SEO.
Say you're an electrician in Hinckley. Your main page might look like this:
- URL: yoursite.co.uk/electrician-hinckley
- Page title: Electrician in Hinckley | Your Business Name
- H1: Electrician in Hinckley
- First paragraph: "We're a local electrician in Hinckley, covering..."
Write it the way a person would say it. Cramming the phrase in over and over won't help, and it reads badly to customers. Using it once in each of those spots is plenty.
Write one page for each service
A single "Services" page that lists everything you do in one paragraph is hard for Google to rank and hard for an AI tool to quote. Give each main service its own page that explains what it is, who it's for, roughly what it costs and which areas you cover.
Answer questions directly
Think about the questions customers ask you on the phone and answer them on your site in plain language. Put the answer in the first sentence or two, then add the detail. An FAQ section at the bottom of a page is an easy way to do this, and it's a format AI tools can lift answers from without much effort.
Keep your business details consistent
Your business name, address and phone number should match on your website, your Google Business Profile and any directories you're listed in. When those details disagree, search engines and AI tools have a harder time working out which version is right.
Use structured data
Structured data (often called schema markup) is a bit of code that tells search engines what's on a page: your business type, opening hours, reviews, prices or FAQs. Visitors never see it, but Google and other tools can read it, which makes your information easier for them to understand and reuse.
Collect reviews
Reviews help you show up in Google's map results, and they give AI tools something independent to point to when they describe your business. Ask happy customers straight after the job, while it's fresh in their mind. A short message with a direct link to your review page is much easier for them to act on than a vague "leave us a review sometime".
Tell search engines when something changes
When you add or update a page, you want search engines to notice quickly. IndexNow lets your site tell Bing and other supported search engines about changes straight away. I wrote a beginner's guide to IndexNow if you want to set it up yourself.
Do you still need SEO now people use AI?
Yes. Plenty of people still search Google the normal way, especially when they're ready to buy, and the AI answers depend on pages that search engines have already found. The way I think about it, SEO gets your site into the library and AEO makes sure the right page is easy to quote once it's on the shelf.
What has changed is that thin content is harder to get away with. A page written only to squeeze in keywords gives an AI tool nothing worth repeating, so the sites that do well are usually the ones that are actually useful.
Frequently asked questions
What does SEO stand for?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It's the work of helping your website appear in Google, Bing and other search engines when people look for what you offer.
What does AEO stand for?
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It's the work of helping your business get mentioned or cited in answers from AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google's AI Overviews.
Is AEO the same as SEO?
No, but they overlap a lot. SEO aims to get your pages ranked and clicked. AEO aims to get your business named in an AI answer. Most of the groundwork, like fast pages, clear content and good reviews, helps with both.
How long does SEO take to work?
It varies. For a local business it's normal to wait a few months before you see steady results. Competitive searches in big cities take longer than searches for a smaller town, and a site that needs a lot of fixing at the start will take longer too.
Can a small business do SEO and AEO itself?
A lot of it, yes. Writing clear service pages, answering customer questions, keeping your details consistent and asking for reviews are all things you can do yourself. The technical side, such as speed, structured data and how the site is put together, is where most people bring in help.
How do I know if AI tools mention my business?
Ask them. Type in the questions your customers would ask, such as "best electrician in Leicester" or whatever fits your trade and town, into ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and see who comes up. Check again every month or so, because the answers change.
Want a hand with it?
We're a web design and SEO business based in Leicester, and we build our sites with both search engines and AI tools in mind. If you'd like to know where your site stands, have a look at our SEO services and AI search optimisation. If you're local, our page on SEO in Leicester covers how we work with businesses in the area, or you can get in touch and we'll take a look at your site for you.
