More people now ask ChatGPT for a recommendation than you might think. They type in "best accountant near me" or "which CRM should a small business use" and take the answer at face value. So business owners are starting to ask a fair question: how do I get my business to show up there?

Right on cue, a new set of acronyms has appeared. AEO. GEO. Agencies are selling both as brand new services you apparently need, and warning that regular SEO is finished. Before you pay anyone for that, it helps to know what these terms mean and what Google itself has said about them. The short version is that most of this is SEO wearing a new hat.

What AEO and GEO actually mean

AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. Strip away the packaging and both describe the same goal: getting your business surfaced when someone asks an AI tool a question instead of scrolling a list of blue links.

That's it. There's no secret system behind the letters. The question worth asking is whether reaching those AI answers takes a different kind of work from normal search, or the same work you should already be doing. Google has answered that one directly.

Google publishes its own guidance for showing up in AI Overviews and Gemini, and it's blunt about the idea that AI search is a separate discipline. In its own guide to optimizing for AI features, it puts it plainly:

From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.

Google also says the best practices for SEO stay relevant because its AI features are built on the same core Search ranking and quality systems, and that there is no special schema markup you need to add. The takeaway is simple. AI Overviews and Gemini run on the same ranking systems as normal Google Search. Rank well and you are already eligible to be pulled into an AI answer. There is no separate switch to flip.

That covers Google. ChatGPT is a different tool built by a different company, so it deserves its own explanation. The good news is the logic lands in the same place.

How ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Gemini decide which businesses to mention

None of these tools invent answers from nothing. They lean on what already exists across the web, and they favour sources that look trustworthy and are talked about in more than one place. Here is how that plays out per tool.

How to show up in Google AI Overviews and Gemini

These are Google's own features, so they use Google's index and Google's ranking signals. A page has to be indexed and capable of showing up in normal search before it can appear as a source in an AI Overview. In plain terms, the same things that get you ranking on page one are the things that get you cited by the AI on top of it. Good technical SEO, helpful content, and a site Google trusts.

How to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT

ChatGPT works from a mix of its training data and live web results when it browses. It cannot check every site in real time, so it leans on brands that show up repeatedly across the internet: mentioned on other sites, reviewed, referenced, written about. If your business is a known name in your field, ChatGPT has seen you in enough places to bring you up. If you exist only on your own website and nowhere else, it has little reason to.

Different engine, same underlying rule. Both reward businesses that have built a real presence and a trusted reputation online.

What actually gets your business mentioned in AI tools

Once you accept that AI search runs on the same foundations as regular search, the to-do list stops being mysterious. It is the work that has always separated businesses that get found from ones that don't.

If that list looks familiar, it should. It is ordinary SEO and content marketing done properly. Build those, and being surfaced by AI stops being a separate project and becomes a side effect of the work.

What you can safely ignore about AEO and GEO

A fair amount of what is being sold under these labels is noise. Some things you do not need to worry about:

If an agency is pitching GEO as a brand new product, the honest question to ask is what it includes that good SEO doesn't. Most of the time the honest answer is: not much.

Do this and AI search takes care of itself

Here is the whole thing in one line. If your SEO is strong and your brand is genuinely known and trusted online, showing up in ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Gemini happens on its own. The businesses winning in AI search are the ones that were already doing the fundamentals well. There is no shortcut that skips that part, whatever it is being called this month.

That is the work we do every day. We build the technical foundation, the content, and the brand authority that gets you found in normal search and, by extension, in the AI tools sitting on top of it. It is the same approach behind ranking across multiple markets, and it is what our SEO service is built around.

If you would like a straight answer on where your site stands and what is worth fixing first, tell us about your business and we will take a look. No acronyms required.