AI SEO · AEO · GEO
Ranking puts you in a list of ten. Being named puts you in a list of five, or nowhere. We run the prompts, record which sources the engines cite, and build from there — starting with an audit rather than a contract.
The short answer
It measures whether AI assistants name your business when customers ask for a recommendation, then works on the sources those answers are built from. Roughly four fifths of that sits outside your website — listings, review platforms, community discussion and editorial coverage — which is why it is a different discipline from the SEO you are probably already paying for.
Fifty prompts your customers actually use, across all four engines, three runs each. For every prompt: whether you were named, who was named instead, and which source the engine cited. The last column is the diagnosis, and almost nobody reports it.
Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Foursquare, Yelp and the directories specific to your category — claimed, completed and reconciled. Unglamorous, finite, and the fastest-moving part of the score.
The phase most agencies skip. Brands are around six times more likely to be cited through third-party sources than their own domain, so this is where the leverage is: local editorial, genuine community presence, vertical authority profiles. Never astroturfing — it is detectable and it backfires.
The same prompt set, monthly, with the citation source behind every mention. You see the number move and you know what moved it. If it has not moved, you get told that instead of a traffic chart.
Terminology
These are sold as different things. They are not. The useful distinction is not between the acronyms, it is between being ranked and being named — and that one changes what the work is.
Framed around getting your content used in a direct answer rather than a list of links. In practice, for a local business, the work is listings, reviews and third-party presence.
Framed around being cited inside AI-generated output. Same inputs, different emphasis. Where a vendor draws the line between GEO and AEO usually tells you what they are selling.
The broadest of the three and the one most people actually type. Useful as a search term, slightly misleading as a description: the majority of the work happens nowhere near your website.
Newer phrasing for the same objective. Occasionally used more narrowly for chatbot-specific work, but no standard definition exists and nobody should pretend otherwise.
Longer version, including why most vendors draw the line where they do: GEO vs SEO vs AEO — what the terms actually mean.
Why one score is not enough
| Engine | Reads |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT | Bing · Foursquare · Yelp |
| Gemini / AI Overviews | Google · Business Profile |
| Perplexity | Own index · Reddit |
| Copilot | Bing · editorial |
An agency optimising only for Google is working one surface out of four. We report each engine separately, because the fix for one is rarely the fix for another.
Against a traditional agency
Not a criticism of SEO — it still matters. These are simply different jobs, and most operators are only buying one of them.
| Traditional SEO agency | First Five | |
|---|---|---|
| Engines covered | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot | |
| Where the work happens | Almost entirely on your website | Roughly four fifths off it, where citations come from |
| What success looks like | A position on page one | Being named in a list of five |
| Primary data source | Google Search Console | Business Profile, Bing Places, Foursquare, Yelp, review platforms |
| How reviews are treated | Reputation management | A primary input to whether you get named |
| Monthly deliverable | A traffic report | A score, a per-engine breakdown, and a citation source map |
| When you are not cited | No visibility into why | The exact source that produced a competitor mention instead |
| What compounds | Rankings reset with each core update | Presence in the sources engines read |
Every row above is checkable. If your current agency covers a row we have marked, tell us and we will correct it.
Industries
The method does not change between industries. The questions your customers ask, the sources the engines trust, and the rules you have to advertise inside all do — so the work is specified per category rather than sold as one package.
Owner-operated, 1–3 locations
Owner-operated, 1–3 locations
Surgeon-owned, 1–3 locations
Doctor-owned, 1–3 locations
Physician-owned, 1–3 locations
Independent or single-unit studios
Owner-operated, 1–3 locations
Owner-operated, 1–3 locations, licensed and already spending on marketing
Owner-operated, 1–3 locations or telehealth, licensed in its state
Direct-to-consumer, own manufacturing or white-label, already spending on acquisition
7 questions
Not materially. All three describe getting a business named inside an AI-generated answer rather than ranked in a list of links. AEO is usually framed around direct question-answering and GEO around generative engines, but the inputs are the same: listings, reviews, third-party presence and content an engine can extract. If an agency’s pitch depends on the distinction, the distinction is a sales tool.
No, and the difference is measurable. Traditional SEO works almost entirely on your domain. Around four fifths of this work happens off it, because that is where assistants resolve local recommendations from. An SEO retainer can be executed perfectly and leave you absent from every answer your customers see — not through bad work, but because it was pointed at a different surface.
No, and we would rather you did not. The work is largely complementary — theirs is on your website, most of ours is not. We will tell you plainly if we think the two overlap enough that you are paying twice.
No, and be sceptical of anyone who does. No AI platform publishes how it selects sources. We work from measured output and correlations documented across the industry, we report honestly, and we re-baseline the source map quarterly because these systems change fast.
By observation rather than insider access. A fixed prompt set, run repeatedly across four engines, with the outputs and cited sources recorded each time. It is empirical measurement of behaviour, not a claim about internal ranking factors. You get the raw log, not just a summary.
Regulated local businesses where a recommendation carries real weight — aesthetics, dental, chiropractic, plastic surgery, medical weight loss, recovery and wellness, and the cannabis and CBD categories. The method is the same across all of them; the sources engines trust and the advertising rules are not.
The entry engagement is a fixed-price project at $1,500 — a baseline across four engines, every listing claimed and corrected, re-measured at 30 days. Ongoing work starts at $1,200 a month with no minimum term. Everything is published on the pricing page rather than quoted after a discovery call.
Fifty prompts, four engines, your markets. You will see your score and exactly who is being named instead — before you commit to anything.
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