A customer has a problem and types a question. Ten years ago that question ended on a page of links. Today it can end in four different places, and each one reads your business in a different way.
We think about visibility as four surfaces. They overlap, they share a foundation, and they are measured differently. This guide walks through each one in plain terms.
The short version
| Surface | Where it appears | What it asks of your site |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Google and Bing results | Can search engines crawl, index and rank your pages? |
| AEO | Featured snippets, People Also Ask, AI Overviews | Do your pages answer real questions in a form that can be lifted as the answer? |
| GEO | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot | Do AI assistants mention you, accurately, and link to you? |
| AIEO | AI agents and crawlers | Can software find your prices, read your forms and complete a task? |
SEO: being found in search results
Search engine optimisation is still the floor everything else stands on. It covers whether search engines can reach your pages, understand what each one is about, and trust it enough to rank it.
In practice that means a handful of unglamorous checks:
- Important pages can be crawled and are listed in your sitemap.
- Each page has its own clear title and description.
- Structured data says what your business is, what it offers and where.
- Pages load quickly on a phone.
- Your name, address, services and hours match everywhere they appear.
How it is measured: rankings, traffic from search and the enquiries that traffic produces.
AEO: being the answer inside search
Answer engine optimisation is about the box at the top of the results: the featured snippet, the People Also Ask answers, and increasingly the AI Overview. Here the search engine does not send people to a list. It lifts a passage and shows it as the answer.
That changes what a good page looks like. The answer has to come first, in a couple of sentences that make sense on their own, directly under a heading that matches how a customer asks the question. The detail follows for anyone who wants it.
When Google shows an AI summary, people click a regular result 8% of the time, compared with 15% when there is no summary (Pew Research Center, July 2025). Being the source of that answer is one way to stay in view.
How it is measured: how many of your customers' questions your pages answer, and how many answer boxes and AI Overview citations you hold.
GEO: being named by AI assistants
Generative engine optimisation is about standalone assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. A customer asks for a recommendation and the assistant writes a short answer that names a few businesses.
Those answers are built from what the assistant can find and read: your site, your business profiles, directories, reviews and articles that mention you. When those sources disagree, the answer can be out of date, wrong, or missing you altogether.
Being named in the answer, and described correctly, is now part of being found.
The work is to track the questions buyers actually ask, keep your facts consistent wherever they appear, fix wrong answers at their source, and earn mentions in the places assistants read.
How it is measured: how often you are mentioned for the questions that matter, how often an answer links to you, and whether what it says is right.
AIEO: being usable by AI agents
AI engine optimisation is the newest surface. Agents are software that browse on a person's behalf: they compare options, check a price, pick a time and book. Crawlers collect pages for AI tools to use later.
An agent does not admire your design. It needs to find the price, understand the form, press the right button and finish the task. Common blockers are easy to miss:
- Pages or bots blocked in
robots.txt, or a bot wall that refuses automated visitors. - Prices shown only inside an image.
- Form fields without labels, and buttons without names.
- Content that only appears after JavaScript runs.
How it is measured: whether an agent can complete real tasks on your site, such as finding a price or booking a slot, and whether AI crawlers can access your pages.
Where to start
Most businesses should start with the foundation, because each surface reuses the same pages and facts. The quickest way to see where you stand is to score your website: it checks readiness for all four surfaces in under a minute and lists the fixes that matter most.
Readiness is only half the picture. To see what search engines and AI tools actually say about you today, the free AI visibility audit tests real customer questions across the major AI tools and shows who gets named instead of you.