Simply put: SEO is about winning the click. AEO is about winning a spot in the answer. GEO is about winning the citation. Most companies need all three, but the order and weighting change in 2026.

Many businesses think of schema markup as something SEO teams add to a website to help Google understand products, articles, reviews, and FAQs. That’s true, but in an AI-driven search landscape, schema is also one of the clearest ways to tell machines who you are, what you offer, who’s behind the content, and how your pages relate to real-world entities.

SEO is about ranking high in search results and earning clicks. AEO is about becoming the answer AI engines give. SEO helps you get found, AEO helps you get used. Most businesses need both.

Ad costs are rising while conversion rates fall, and the buyer journey increasingly starts in AI tools. Businesses should therefore complement paid advertising with AI visibility: clear product pages, comparison content, FAQs, and structured data that make your offer easy for AI systems to understand and recommend.

AI visibility refers to how well a company is understood, mentioned, and cited in responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overview, Gemini, and other AI engines. SEO remains important, but ranking on Google is no longer enough if the goal is to be selected as a source in AI-generated responses.

Work on AI visibility in five steps: 1) analyse how AI describes you today, 2) prioritise 5–10 questions and 3–5 high-value pages, 3) rebuild those pages answer-first, 4) use consistent terminology across your site, and 5) measure and improve monthly.

Measure AI visibility with five KPIs: mention rate (how often you appear), citation rate (how often you are cited as a source), share of voice (your share versus competitors), sentiment (how you are described), and business impact (branded search, leads, conversions). Start with 10–20 fixed questions tested monthly.

What actually works for AI visibility: make your website clearer before producing more content, clean up structure (H1, specific H2s, short paragraphs), build FAQs from real customer questions, and start now, most of your competitors have not yet begun.