Plain English
Search, answers, and AI, explained.
Three acronyms, one idea: when someone asks a question you can answer, be the page they find. Here is what each term means, without the jargon.
Three places people find you
SEO, AEO, and GEO, side by side
Each one is about appearing somewhere slightly different. The page that wins is usually the same.
SEO Search engine optimization
Making pages that search engines like Google show when people search for what you offer.
It is the work that turns searches into visits without paying for each click.
AEO Answer engine optimization
Writing pages so a search engine or assistant can lift a clear, direct answer from them.
More searches end with an answer on the results page or from a voice assistant. Being the source of that answer keeps you in front of people.
GEO Generative engine optimization
Earning a mention or citation when AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews write an answer.
People increasingly ask an assistant instead of scanning links. If the assistant names you, you are in the shortlist.
How the three fit together
SEO, AEO, and GEO are mostly the same craft aimed at different readers: be the clearest, most trustworthy page on the question.
You do not need three strategies. Pages that are accurate, specific, well-structured, and easy to crawl do well in all three.
Reading the numbers
The metrics worth knowing
Five numbers explain most of what happens to a page in search.
- Impressions
How many times one of your pages was shown in search results, whether or not anyone clicked.
Why it matters. Rising impressions with flat clicks usually means you are visible but not compelling, which is fixable.
- Clicks and CTRClick-through rate
Clicks are visits from search. CTR is clicks divided by impressions: the share of people who saw you and chose you.
Why it matters. A better title and description can raise CTR without moving your ranking at all.
1,000 impressions and 40 clicks is a 4% CTR.
- Average position
Where a page tends to appear in Google's results, where 1 is the top. It is an average across every search it appeared for.
Why it matters. Position 3 and position 11 look similar as numbers, but 11 is on page two, where very few people look.
- Striking distance
A page ranking just off the top results, roughly positions 8 to 20, for a search people actually make.
Why it matters. These are usually the quickest wins: a focused improvement can move them onto page one.
- Indexing
Whether a search engine has read a page and stored it so it can be shown. An unindexed page cannot rank at all.
Why it matters. Publishing is not the finish line. A page has to be found, read, and indexed before it can earn anything.
- Content decay
A page that used to bring visits slowly losing them, because competitors improved, facts aged, or searches changed.
Why it matters. Refreshing a decaying page is often cheaper than writing a new one, and it protects traffic you already earned.
- Attribution
Connecting a result, like an enquiry or a sale, to the page the visitor first landed on.
Why it matters. It is how you tell which pages are doing commercial work and which only collect visits.
Under the hood
What helps machines understand a page
None of these are tricks. Each one makes a page easier to find, read, or trust.
- Structured data
A small, invisible label on a page that tells machines what it is: a product, a business, a recipe, an FAQ.
Why it matters. It helps search engines understand a page precisely and can qualify it for richer results, like star ratings or opening hours.
Marking up your business hours so Google can show “Open until 6pm”.
- llms.txt
A plain-text file at the root of a site that points AI tools to the pages that best explain what you do.
Why it matters. It is a courtesy to assistants, not a ranking switch: it helps them find your best explanation instead of guessing.
- Internal links
Links from one page on your site to another.
Why it matters. They help visitors and search engines find pages, and signal which pages matter most. An unlinked page is easy to miss.
- Bing's index
The library of pages Microsoft's Bing has read. ChatGPT's web search draws heavily on it.
Why it matters. A page Bing has not indexed is much less likely to be found by ChatGPT, even if it ranks on Google.
Want the long version of any of these? Browse the guides
Put it to work
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