Table of contents
Forrester principal analyst Nikhil Lai summed up the relationship in November 2025: "AEO is significantly, but not fundamentally, different from SEO." This guide covers both halves of that sentence, using what Google and OpenAI publish about their own AI answers, and ends with the order we would work in for a trade or local service firm. If the term is new to you, start with what AEO is.
How is AEO different from traditional SEO?
The work overlaps, but the result looks different from the customer's side.
| SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the customer sees you | Google's list of results and its map of nearby businesses | Inside a written answer from ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity or Claude |
| What a win looks like | Your page or profile near the top, and a call or form from it | Your business named in the answer, with the right details beside it |
| What gets used | Whole pages and your Google Business Profile | Facts and short passages that make sense on their own |
| Who reads your website | Google's crawler | Google's crawler, plus others such as OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search |
| How you check it | Search Console, and calls and forms by page | Asking the AI tools your customers' questions on a schedule and noting the answers |
| What can go wrong unnoticed | You slip down the results | An AI tool names a rival, or gives a customer your old number |
For a local business, the biggest difference is the shortlist. A Google search shows a page of results and a map of nearby firms, and the customer does the choosing. An AI answer names a handful of businesses and says something about each, so part of the choosing is done before the customer sees a name. Coming fourth on Google still gets you seen. Being left out of an AI answer means that customer never hears your name.
Checking is new work. Search Console shows which Google searches brought up your site and how many people clicked. ChatGPT has no equivalent report for business owners, so the only way to know what it says about you is to ask it, regularly, and write the answers down.
Accuracy needs watching. On Google, a customer sees your own profile and your own pages. In an AI answer they see a summary of what the tool found, and OpenAI's help page warns that "Search results and citations can be incomplete, outdated, or incorrect". An answer that gives your old opening hours, or leaves out half your service area, loses you the call, and nothing tells you it happened.
What AEO and SEO have in common
Most of the work, and Google says so plainly. Its guidance on AI features states that "The best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Google Search" and that "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary".
The detail is just as plain. To be shown as a link in those answers, "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet", and "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features". The same page lists checking that your "Business Profile information is up-to-date" among the basics that still count.
ChatGPT's answers start from search as well. OpenAI says ChatGPT search "sometimes partners with other search providers", sending them rewritten versions of the question, and that it may share a person's approximate location with "trusted third-party providers that help provide more local information, such as nearby business listings". Lai's Forrester post adds that AEO "depends much more on Bing's index", which is a good reason to claim your Bing Places for Business listing as well as your Google one.
So the groundwork for a local business is one list, whichever label you put on it:
- a complete Google Business Profile
- the same name, address and phone number on every site that lists you
- a steady flow of reviews, with replies
- a page for each service in each area you cover, with the facts in plain sentences
Do those well and you have done most of the work for both at once.
Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?
Evolving. Google still tells site owners that the basics of SEO apply to its AI Overviews and AI Mode, which it would not do if the work had stopped mattering. What has changed is where some answers get read: inside an AI tool, before anyone visits your website.
That puts more weight on a few things. Facts need to be plain enough to quote: "emergency call-outs in Bromley and Beckenham, seven days a week" is a line an AI tool can repeat, while "covering the South East" gives it nothing. Your details need to match on every site, because an AI tool that finds two phone numbers for you may give a customer the wrong one. Mentions on other people's sites, such as a trade body or the local paper, show that someone other than you vouches for the business.
And someone has to check what the tools say, because no report will tell you.
If you are still weighing up whether search work pays at all, our guide to whether SEO is worth it for a small business covers when it pays back and when it is the wrong spend.
Can ChatGPT do SEO?
Partly. It can draft a service page or a polite reply to a review. It cannot claim your profile, ask your customers for reviews, correct a directory listing or see your Search Console, and those are the jobs that move both SEO and AEO for a local business. Treat it as a writing assistant, and check every fact it writes about your business before you publish it.
What should a local business do first?
Work in this order, so nothing you pay for, or spend your evenings on, is wasted.
1. Fix what both depend on
Finish the groundwork list above. Our guide to getting your business recommended by ChatGPT takes each item in turn, from your Google profile to the directories for your trade. Then check the technical basics. Your pages should be indexed in Google, which the URL inspection tool in Search Console will confirm, and your website should not block OpenAI's search crawler. OpenAI's crawler guide recommends "allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site's robots.txt file" and says a change can take about 24 hours to reach ChatGPT search.
2. Then check what the AI tools say
Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions your customers ask, and type the same questions into Google to see its AI Overview. We start from three shapes:
- "Who's the best [your trade] in [your town]?"
- "Emergency [your trade] near [your town]"
- "Is [your business name] any good?"
Note who is named, what is said about you, and which sites each answer cites. If you want a starting point, our free AI visibility checker asks five AI tools 12 questions like these and shows who they name.
3. Then fix what is particular to AI answers
Correct wrong facts where they came from, which is usually a directory listing or an old page. Get listed on the sites the answers cite for your competitors. Add the plain answers your pages are missing, such as the areas you cover and roughly what a typical job costs.
4. Then keep checking
Ask the same questions every month, because the answers can change as the tools are updated and your competitors do their own work. Add "ChatGPT or another AI tool" to the "How did you hear about us?" question on your enquiry form, so you can see whether any of this brings in work.
If step one turns up big gaps, that is SEO work, and it helps your AI answers as well. Our Local SEO plans cover the profile, the reviews and the listings. If the groundwork is done and the AI tools still name your competitors, that is where AI visibility work starts.
How to tell whether each one is working
For SEO, Search Console shows how often your pages appear for your services and towns and how many people click. Your call and form counts show which pages bring in work.
For AEO, run the same questions on a schedule and count how often you are named and whether the facts about you are right. That is what our AI visibility service does with AEO Sonar, our own tracker: 20 questions a week across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews, with the fixes made each month. See how our AI SEO service works.