SEO, AEO and GEO: What Work Should Your Business Pay For?
When comparing SEO, AEO and GEO services, ask what the agency will research, improve, publish, test and measure. The acronym matters less than the work behind it and its connection to your customers.
A useful engagement should make your business easier to discover and evaluate, while giving you a clear view of qualified inquiries and sales outcomes. It should also explain what the agency can control and what remains a decision made by an independent search or AI platform.
Here is a practical buying guide for businesses evaluating search and AI visibility support.
What the terms describe
SEO, or search engine optimization, addresses how search systems discover, interpret and present useful website content. AEO, or answer engine optimization, is commonly used for work that helps content answer specific questions. GEO, or generative engine optimization, is commonly used for work aimed at visibility in AI-generated responses.
These categories overlap. A well-explained service page may help a prospective customer, a conventional search result and an AI system retrieving information for an answer.
Google's current guidance treats optimization for its generative search features as part of SEO. It emphasizes valuable original content and technical foundations rather than a separate collection of AI shortcuts. Google's generative AI optimization guide.
An agency can still use the terms to organize its work. Your proposal should explain where the deliverables differ and where the same task supports several goals.
Buy a customer-question map
Start with the questions that influence a real buying decision.
For a service business, these may involve eligibility, scope, location, integration requirements, price factors, process, alternatives and what happens after contact. Some belong on a service page; others merit a comparison, guide or detailed example.
Ask the agency to show the evidence behind its question selection. Useful inputs can include your authorized sales notes, customer questions, search data, public competitor information and support themes.
A list of popular keywords is only part of the picture. You also need to understand why a question matters to your buyer and what action the answer should support.
The deliverable should connect each priority question to a page, evidence source, content owner and next step. That prevents several pages from repeating the same general message.
Buy improvements to important pages
For each priority page, ask what will become clearer or more useful.
That might include a direct explanation of the service, a better description of buyer fit, a comparison of available approaches, supported examples, or answers to objections that repeatedly delay a decision.
Technical work should address verified barriers: inaccessible pages, conflicting URL signals, missing internal links, inappropriate indexing directives or content that is difficult to use.
Useful answers should be available as text. Visuals can help explain a process, but an image of a dashboard is not evidence of a client result.
Structured data should describe the information that is actually visible and supported. Adding more schema types does not create more expertise. Useful FAQs remain useful to readers, but Google ended its FAQ rich-result feature in May 2026. A proposal should not sell that discontinued search display as an outcome. Google Search documentation updates.
Buy evidence, not borrowed credibility
An agency should explain the source of its case studies and the work it performed.
Ask when the work happened, which entity delivered it, how the metric was calculated, what comparison period was used and what other changes may have influenced the result. If the experience comes from a team member's previous employment, that distinction should be clear.
The same standard applies to your content. Specific experience, original observations and documented examples are more useful than unsupported superlatives.
You do not need to invent a dramatic percentage to explain good work. A well-documented implementation can show the original problem, the decision, the change and the limitations of the available evidence.
A worked example: one question, several useful outputs
Imagine a business buying website conversion support. This is a hypothetical example of our planning method, not a reported client engagement.
The buyer asks: “Can you improve our inquiry process without rebuilding our website?”
The service page should answer the question plainly, explain when a focused improvement is feasible, identify the access needed and describe the limits. A supporting article can explain how to evaluate the current journey. A documented example can show the method without presenting imagined results.
The technical review checks whether the relevant content is accessible and internally linked. The measurement plan checks whether a successful inquiry and its sales outcome can be recorded.
Calling every one of those tasks a separate SEO, AEO and GEO deliverable would not make the work more valuable. The proposal should make the shared work and any platform-specific additions visible.
Know what crawler access can and cannot do
Search systems must be able to access appropriate public content. That does not mean every crawler serves the same purpose.
OpenAI documents separate controls for OAI-SearchBot, used for ChatGPT search, and GPTBot, associated with potential model-training use. Allowing search access does not require accepting the same training preference. OpenAI crawler documentation.
Before changing settings, ask the agency to record the existing preferences and explain the exact effect. Platform controls may group several bots together. Squarespace documents a broad setting for known AI crawlers, so the saved setting and resulting directives should be inspected. Squarespace crawler controls.
Crawler access should be treated as a technical eligibility question. It is not a guarantee that a business will be mentioned, cited or recommended.
Buy a measurement plan with separate layers
Visibility, visits and commercial outcomes should be reported separately.
For Google, the current Search Console Generative AI Performance report covers impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. These are not a count of qualified leads. Google report documentation.
Bing's AI Performance reporting provides citation information across supported experiences and a sample of grounding queries. A citation count should not be described as website traffic. Bing AI Performance.
A practical business report then adds:
Observable referral visits, with source and attribution limitations.
Successful inquiries and the service each inquiry concerns.
Qualification, discovery calls, proposals and won engagements.
Revenue collected and the cost of acquisition and delivery.
If an agency also checks a panel of AI questions, ask it to record the exact question, platform, date, location context and cited sources. Results are samples that may change. They are not a universal ranking.
When a report is unavailable, label it unavailable. When a genuine measured result is zero, label it zero. Those states call for different decisions.
Understand what to exclude from a proposal
Be cautious about guaranteed citations, guaranteed recommendations, fabricated reviews, paid “AI submission” packages, and large quantities of interchangeable articles.
Ask what any special file or technical addition will accomplish. Google states that llms.txt is unnecessary for its search visibility; its existence is not proof of a complete AI strategy. Google's optimization guide.
An experimental tactic should have a stated hypothesis, modest cost, evaluation method and stopping rule. It should not displace basic work that helps the customer or fixes a verified technical problem.
Ask about ownership as well. Your business should know where approved content lives, who can edit it, what tools incur charges, and what happens when the engagement ends.
Choose a scope you can evaluate
A focused first scope might cover one buyer group, a defined set of buying questions, a small number of priority pages, technical triage and a measurement baseline.
The number of pages should follow the work required. Pricing should account for technical complexity, research, expert involvement, writing, production and ongoing maintenance. Advertising spend, third-party tools and agency services should be identified separately.
Ask which work will be completed, which dependencies require your team and what will be reviewed at the next decision point. Neither organic discovery nor a contract should rest on an unsupported promise of results within a fixed number of days.
GUDBEE offers SEO, answer engine optimization, generative engine optimization, and marketing analytics.
If you are evaluating support, contact GUDBEE with your website, the service you want customers to discover, and the questions they ask before buying. Those details provide a useful foundation for defining the work.