AEO and GEO explained: how AI assistants recommend local businesses
A growing slice of your future customers won’t type into Google at all. They’ll ask an AI assistant: “who’s a good mobile mechanic around Geelong?” The assistant answers with a shortlist, and businesses that aren’t in it never know the conversation happened.
Two acronyms have grown up around this. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is about being the direct answer to a question. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is about being the business AI tools mention when they generate a recommendation. The good news for a time-poor owner-operator: you don’t need to master either. You need to understand one idea.
AI assistants can only recommend what they can read
When an AI tool answers “who should I call about a leaking roof in Newcastle”, it draws on public web pages: directories, listings, reviews, business pages. If your business exists on well-structured pages that clearly say what you do and where, you can be in the answer. If your business lives entirely on word of mouth and a phone number in someone’s contacts, you can’t.
That’s the whole mechanism. Everything else is detail.
What makes a page AI-friendly
Roughly the same things that make it Google-friendly and human-friendly:
- Plain statements of fact. “Licensed electrician servicing Newcastle and Lake Macquarie” is something an assistant can quote. A slogan isn’t.
- Specifics. The services you offer, listed by name. The suburbs you cover, spelled out. Assistants answer specific questions with specific matches.
- Reviews. When someone asks for a “good” or “trusted” provider, tools lean on rating signals and review text.
- Consistency. The same business details across several independent pages read as confirmation. One lonely mention reads as a maybe.
Where a listing page fits
A complete Soho’s listing is exactly the kind of page these tools read well: your trade, services, service area, hours, credentials and customer reviews, laid out as structured data on a public page. It gives search engines and answer engines the same clean facts. You fill in a form once; both audiences get what they need.
That’s also why a listing makes a sensible first move for SEO generally. Rather than agonising over a website you haven’t built yet, you publish one strong page now and let it start accumulating visibility and reviews.
Keep your scepticism, keep the groundwork
Nobody can honestly promise you a spot in AI recommendations, and this area shifts month to month. Anyone selling “guaranteed GEO rankings” deserves the same raised eyebrow as the old “page one of Google, guaranteed” crowd. What doesn’t shift is the groundwork: clear public facts about your business, in several trusted places, with genuine reviews attached. Do that and you’re positioned for whatever the search world turns into next.
Be the business AI can find
Put your services, suburbs and reviews on a page built to be read, by people and machines alike.
