SEO, GEO, AEO and the Rest, Explained in Plain Words

SEO, search engine optimisation, is the work of getting a website into Google's results for the searches that matter to a business. It has three parts that people often talk about as if they were separate. The first is technical: Google has to be able to reach every page, load it quickly and understand what each one is about. The second is content: pages that answer the questions people actually type, in the words they actually use. The third is trust: reviews, mentions on other sites and links from them, which tell Google that real people know the business exists. SEO is not dead, and AI has not replaced it. Google itself says that doing well in its AI answers starts with ordinary, well done SEO.

Local SEO is SEO for people nearby: making sure a business shows up when someone searches for what it does in their own town, or on Google Maps. Much of it happens away from the website. The Google Business Profile has to be complete and correct, the business name, address and phone number have to be written exactly the same way everywhere they appear online, and the reviews have to keep coming. For a restaurant, a clinic, a shop or a hotel, local SEO is usually where the first enquiries come from.

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into Google when they look for something. The trap is guessing them. The phrase a business uses to describe itself is often not the one its customers search for, and in Bulgaria people often mix Bulgarian and English words in their searches. Good keyword research uses real figures from Google's own data to see how many people search for each phrase every month, and then builds the pages around the phrases that bring customers rather than the ones that sound impressive.

AI search is the plain umbrella term for people asking an AI assistant a question instead of scrolling through a list of links. Someone types or says a whole question to ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's own AI features, and gets back a written answer that names a few businesses, with links to where the information came from. For a business that changes one important thing: there are no ten results to appear somewhere among. Either the answer names you, or it doesn't.

AI Overviews are the short AI-written answers Google shows at the top of many searches, above the ordinary results. Each one sums up an answer and links to the pages it drew on, and being one of those links is the new version of being on the first page. Google shows them on the searches where it thinks a summary helps, which is why a business can be very visible on some searches and missing from others.

AI Mode is a separate tab in Google Search where, instead of a list of results, you have a conversation: you ask a whole question, Google answers it in writing, and you can carry on with follow-up questions. It works in Bulgaria and in Bulgarian, and in May 2026 Google said it had passed a billion users a month. For local searches AI Mode leans heavily on Google's own information, above all its Business Profile cards, which makes a complete profile matter even more. There is more in our article on your Google Business Profile and AI search.

GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the work of getting a business found, trusted and recommended by AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Generative simply means the AI writes its answer instead of listing links. The assistants look for businesses that might fit a question, read their websites and what other sites say about them, and leave out anything they cannot check. So GEO is mostly about making your facts easy to read and easy to confirm: what you do, where, for whom and what it costs, written plainly on your own site and repeated the same way everywhere else. For Google's own AI answers, Google says GEO is simply good SEO. For ChatGPT and the others, a few technical details matter more, such as letting their robots into the site at all. The full detail is in our guide to GEO.

AEO, answer engine optimisation, is writing pages so a direct answer can be lifted straight out of them, by Google's AI answers, by voice assistants or by chat tools. In practice it means putting the answer first: the question as the heading, then one or two sentences that answer it completely on their own, and only then the detail. You may have noticed this page is written exactly that way. AEO and GEO overlap so much that plenty of people use the two words for the same thing.

An agent ready website is one that AI assistants can act on as well as read: check a price, see what is available, book a table or place an order on someone's behalf. This is already happening. In September 2025 ChatGPT added a checkout inside its chats for users in the United States, and in January 2026 Google and Shopify announced a shared standard that lets AI assistants buy from online shops. For most businesses, being agent ready today means the basics done properly: prices, opening hours, availability and booking written as plain text a machine can read, rather than hidden in pictures or behind forms. The rest gets added as it becomes normal.

A Google Business Profile is the free listing that shows a business on Google Maps and in Google Search, with its address, opening hours, photos and reviews. It used to be called Google My Business, and plenty of people still search for it under that name. It is often the first thing a customer sees, before the website, and Google's AI answers about local businesses draw on it heavily. Claiming it, verifying it and keeping it accurate is one of the most valuable hours a local business can spend. Step by step: how to claim your Google Business Profile.

Structured data, also called schema markup, is a set of hidden labels inside a web page that tell search engines facts in a form they cannot misread: this is a business, this is its address, these are its opening hours, this is a price. Visitors never see it. The labels follow a shared vocabulary from schema.org that Google, Bing and the others understand. It is not a magic switch for AI answers, and Google says its AI features need no special markup, but it takes the guesswork away, and it is what lets Google show extra details next to a result, such as prices or event dates.

llms.txt is a short text file at the root of a website that gives AI tools a plain map of the site: who the business is, what it offers and which pages matter most. It was proposed in 2024 as a voluntary standard, and not everything supports it. Google says its search ignores it completely, while other AI tools may read it. It takes an hour to make and costs nothing to keep, so it is a sensible extra, but it never replaces clear pages.

Google Search Console is Google's free tool that shows how a website is doing in Google Search: which searches it appears for, how often people click, which position it holds and anything that stops Google from reading it. Since June 2026 it also shows how often a site's pages appear inside Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, which we wrote about in you can finally see if AI search is mentioning your business. It is the closest thing to a straight answer about how a website gets found, and it is the report we share with our clients every month.

Every one of these terms describes a part of the same job, and nobody needs to buy them separately. Google & AI Search is our service that covers all of it: SEO, local SEO, GEO, AEO and getting a website agent ready, with the Search Console figures every month. It costs €400 a month on its own, €300 a month if we built your website, and it is included in every Marketing plan. Everything about it is on the Google & AI Search page.