Found: SEO, AEO, and GEO, in plain English
The search you grew up with is changing. Here is what the acronyms mean, and what really gets you found now.
For 20+ years I helped brands get found on a shelf and on a search results page. The rules were stable. You ranked, people clicked, they compared, they bought.
That is changing, fast. More people now ask an AI the question instead of scrolling a page of links. They read the answer, and they stop. If your name is not in that answer, you were never in the running.
Here is the whole thing in plain English, and what I have seen testing it on my own store.
Search Engine Optimization
Getting a search engine to show your page and rank it high enough that people click. The whole thing assumes one thing: that the person clicks.
Answer Engine Optimization
Getting your name inside the AI's written answer, instead of ranking as a link under it. The prize is no longer the click. It is the mention.
Generative Engine Optimization
Getting cited inside AI-generated answers, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.
Here is the part most guides skip. AEO and GEO are used interchangeably. People argue about the labels at conferences. Do not get lost in the alphabet. Underneath, it is mostly one shared job: be the clear, trusted, consistently-described option so an AI is willing to name you.
Why this matters now
The honest version: AI traffic is still small. But it converts, and you cannot get added to a shortlist after the fact.
This year, across every referral source that sent my own store traffic, the only one that produced a sale was ChatGPT. Real orders, at roughly an 8% conversion rate. Every traditional referrer sent visits and zero orders.
Search told the same story with a twist. Google sent the most traffic, but Bing and DuckDuckGo converted, together they drove a real share of my search sales. The lesson is not to chase Google. It is to be clear and accessible everywhere an engine or an agent looks.
Say the same thing everywhere
Your site, every bio, review sites, directories, your email signature. An AI does not look you up in a database. It notices which words keep appearing next to your name. Four different descriptions give it nothing confident to repeat, so it names a competitor. Consistency is not tidiness. It is the mechanism.
Get talked about off your own site
Roughly 85% of AI brand mentions come from sites that are not yours. Reviews, press, podcast show notes, directories, partner pages. Your own site has a ceiling until other people describe you.
Add something new (information gain)
AI answers cut duplicate facts. In a page of links, the fourth result saying the same thing still holds position four. In an AI answer there is no position four. A page either adds something that has not been said yet, or it gets left out. The reliable way to be different is to publish something only you have. Your own data, a real test, numbers from your own operation.
Structure content so it can be lifted
Make headings real questions. Answer in the first two sentences. Trade adjectives for specifics ("$29" and "ships in 2 days," rather than "affordable" and "fast"). Add basic schema. AI lifts one clean passage with none of the surrounding context, so each passage has to stand alone.
Let the AI crawlers in
If your site blocks them, everything on it is invisible to AI. A five-minute check of your robots file.
My angle: clean your data first
Here is where 20+ years in retail changes how I see this. Product data is the most duplicated content on the web. Ten sites describe the same item with the same words. An AI shopping agent does not feel your brand tagline. It parses your specs, your price, your delivery coverage, your customization options.
An agent is an amplifier. Point it at accurate, current, well-structured data and it compounds quality. Point it at data nobody has checked in two years and it compounds that instead, faster than any person would, and with no one there to catch it.
Getting found in the age of AI is mostly a data-hygiene and consistency problem, more than a cleverness problem. On my own store I did the boring work first, made product, price, delivery, and corporate-gifting details explicit and accurate across search engines, before chasing any new channel.
Measure the right thing
Stop grading yourself only on traffic. The new scoreboard is how often you get named. Once a month, ask the AI models the ten questions your customers ask, and log whether you got named and which sources they cited. That tells you where to go get mentioned next.
One honest note from my own dashboards: the tools still have gaps. My Google keyword panel showed "No Data" for the year even with real visits, so my topic ideas are still hypotheses, not proven winners. Check your connections before you trust the numbers.
You do not have to become an SEO expert.
If you want to know whether your site and your product data are ready for how people search now, that is exactly what an AI Opportunity Audit looks at.
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