If you’ve been keeping an eye on digital marketing over the past year or so, you may have come across the terms AEO and GEO alongside the more familiar SEO. They represent a shift in how people find businesses online and, increasingly, how AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overview and Perplexity decide which businesses to mention when someone asks a question.
For small businesses in Plymouth and across Devon, understanding the difference between these three approaches isn’t just for the technically minded. It has practical implications for whether your business gets found at all.
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of making your website more likely to appear in Google’s search results when someone searches for a relevant term. It covers everything from the words on your pages and the speed at which they load, to how many other reputable websites link to yours and how clearly structured your content is.
SEO remains the foundation of online visibility for the vast majority of businesses, and Google still drives more website traffic than all other sources combined. If someone in Plymouth searches for “accountant near me” and your website is well optimised, there’s a good chance it appears. That direct connection between a search and a website visit is still worth a great deal.
What has changed is that SEO on its own no longer covers the full picture of how people find businesses online.
Answer Engine Optimisation is about making your content the source that AI tools and voice assistants choose to answer a specific question. When someone asks Google Assistant, Siri or Alexa a question out loud, or when Google shows a direct answer box at the top of its results page, that answer has to come from somewhere. AEO is the practice of making sure it comes from you.
Content optimised for answer engines gets to the point quickly, uses clear and direct language, and structures questions and answers in a way that AI systems can easily extract and cite. A plumber in Plymouth who has a page answering “how much does it cost to fix a leaking radiator in Plymouth” in concrete, specific terms is far more likely to be cited in a voice search result or an AI answer than a plumber whose website only has a general services page.
Industry research from Search Engine Land identifies AI assistants including ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity as the most direct tools for understanding how AI systems currently respond to questions in your category. Querying these platforms with the same questions your customers are likely to ask, and analysing which businesses come up and why, gives a useful picture of where you stand.
Generative Engine Optimisation is newer still and focuses specifically on whether AI-generated responses reference your business when producing summaries and recommendations. Where AEO is largely about featured snippets and voice answers, GEO is about the broader question of whether AI systems include your brand when they generate a response about your category or location.
According to Search Engine Land’s analysis of GEO metrics for 2026, visibility in generative search goes beyond being indexed or ranked. Your content needs to be cited, summarised or incorporated into AI responses. The three qualities that matter most are extractability (can the key point be pulled out easily?), credibility (is the source trustworthy enough to cite?) and relevance (does it directly address what was asked?).
For a local business, this means that being mentioned consistently in local press, Google reviews, business directories, industry publications and third-party sources helps AI systems build a more complete picture of who you are. A restaurant in Plymouth city centre that appears in Visit Plymouth’s listings, has a well-maintained Google Business Profile with recent reviews and is covered occasionally in local media is building GEO signals whether it knows it or not.
It helps to think of these three approaches as layers rather than alternatives. SEO is the foundation: without it, neither AEO nor GEO works properly. A website that Google can’t crawl, that loads slowly on mobile or that has thin or poorly structured content gives AI systems nothing useful to work with.
AEO builds on that foundation by shaping your content to answer questions directly. GEO extends it further by building the kind of wider presence and reputation that AI systems draw on when deciding which businesses to surface.
None of this requires a large budget or a technical team. The same things that have always made a business website perform well, clear writing, genuine expertise, a well-organised structure, a good reputation in the local area, are the same things that help it perform in AI-driven search. The difference is that being deliberate about it matters more than it used to.
If you’d like to understand how your Plymouth or Devon business is currently performing across all three and where the most useful improvements would be, our SEO services for small businesses cover all of this. Get in touch with the b:web team in Plymouth to talk it through.
