Questions we get askedAnswered straight

AEO is the work of getting an AI assistant to name your business inside its answer, instead of ranking in a list of links. The practical difference from SEO is what counts as success: SEO wants the click, AEO wants to be the source the assistant cites. It depends on having clear, checkable text a model can lift and attribute.

GEO is the work of appearing inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI summaries. It overlaps heavily with AEO, and in practice the two terms are used almost interchangeably: GEO emphasises the generative engines, AEO emphasises being the direct answer.

SEO is about appearing in the list of results, and succeeds when someone clicks. AEO is about being the answer itself, and succeeds when you get cited. GEO is about showing up inside text an AI generates. All three rest on the same foundation — clear, structured, verifiable content — so the work overlaps far more than the three names suggest.

Three things have to be true. Your site has to be readable without JavaScript, because most AI crawlers don't run it. It has to contain text that answers specific questions, since a model quotes sentences and never watches a video or reads an image. And it needs structured data stating who you are, where you are and what you do. Without those, there is nothing for an assistant to cite.

Usually one of three reasons: the site renders its content with JavaScript that the crawler never executes, there is no text on it that answers the question being asked, or nothing on the page confirms the business name, location and category in a machine-readable way. Models don't guess — they repeat what they can read and verify.

A CRM manages the relationship with the customer: contacts, opportunities, follow-up, sales. An ERP manages the business's own resources: inventory, purchasing, invoicing, accounting. Smaller businesses usually need the CRM first, because that's where the money comes in; the ERP becomes necessary when stock and operations are what's getting complicated.

It depends on how standard your process is. If you work roughly the way the rest of your industry works, an off-the-shelf tool will do the job and cost less — there's no prize for building what already exists. Custom becomes worth it when your process is genuinely different, and adapting it to a generic tool would mean changing how you actually work.