SEO, AEO & GEO
Rank on Google. Get named by ChatGPT.
Search stopped being ten blue links. A growing share of the people asking about your service now get a written answer at the top of the page, and plenty of them never scroll past it. The businesses named inside that answer are taking work from businesses that still rank perfectly well.
Two jobs now, not one. You still have to rank. You also have to be the source an answer engine finds easiest to quote about your trade, in your town.
What changed
The shift
The answer is the new front page
Ask Google about a local service now and you will often get a written answer before a single link. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot the same question and there are no links at all, just a few sentences naming two or three businesses. Your rankings have not moved. They have stopped being the first thing anyone sees.
Ranking and getting cited are two different jobs
Ranking is a contest between pages. Getting cited is a contest between claims. A model writing an answer is looking for a source it can repeat without being wrong, so it favours pages that commit to something specific: what you do, where you do it, who it is for, what it costs, and what you will not take on. The hedged language most service pages are written in gives it nothing to lift.
This is the part people miss. A page can be fast, well linked, technically clean and ranking third, and still be invisible inside the answers, because it never actually says anything quotable.
What gets a business named
- Claims someone could check. "Same day service across Hillsborough and Pasco, seven days a week" is quotable. "Your trusted partner in home comfort" is not.
- The same facts everywhere. Hours, service area and services should match across your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory that lists you. Contradictions make you a risky source to quote.
- Structured data that matches the page. Schema is how you state plainly what a machine would otherwise have to infer, and inferring is where it gets you wrong.
- Other people talking about you. Reviews, forum threads, local press, supplier and association pages. What others say about you carries more weight than what you say about yourself.
- Answers written as answers. A real question as the heading, the direct response in the first sentence, the detail underneath. That is most of what answer engine optimisation actually is.
The traffic changes shape
Expect fewer visits and better ones. When the answer handles the browsing, the people who still click have already decided they need someone. That has to be measured properly, because a fall in sessions can sit alongside a rise in calls, and if you are only watching traffic you will think something broke.
What has not changed
Technical health still gates everything: speed, crawlability, redirects that resolve, internal links that make sense. Google Business Profile still decides the map pack. Reviews still decide who gets called. And content still has to be about what people actually type, not what a keyword tool exported.
The work
What you get
- Local rankings. Google Business Profile, the map pack, service areas, reviews, citation cleanup.
- Technical. Speed, crawl issues, broken redirects, the structural problems that cap everything else.
- Content that answers. Pages built around what people actually type, not a keyword volume export.
- Structured data. The markup that tells a search engine plainly what you do and where.
- Reporting you can read. What moved, what did not, what I am doing next. One page.
“Mike helped show me how to use my Google Business page to help with my rankings. Gave me advice on getting reviews and has steadily helped us with higher rankings.”
“I was building my own site but it was just there. He rebuilt it and showed me how to do a lot of stuff on my own because I just don’t have the budget. Now I will pay when I need him. I sign no contracts. I love it, so easy.”
“I have used Mike for a lot of campaigns. He built the site for us and now I have him run my SEO.”
I have run AI content further than the people selling it to you
On AI search
Most agencies pitching AI content have run it across a handful of blog posts. I built a publishing pipeline and pushed it to full novel length, repeatedly, specifically to find where it falls apart.
It falls apart in ways that matter to you. Quality sags rather than collapsing, so nobody notices until forty pages sound identical. Left alone it writes the most average version of any topic, which is precisely how a service page ends up indistinguishable from two hundred others. And it cannot know the things that actually make a local page win, because those live in your head and nowhere else.
So I use it where it earns its place: research, first drafts, structured data, the tedious middle of a technical audit. I will not fill your site with generated pages.
Asked often
How long does SEO take to work?
Technical fixes can move rankings within a few weeks. Local rankings in a competitive market usually take three to six months. Anyone promising page one by next month is either guessing or about to get your site penalised.
What is the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?
SEO gets you ranked in a list of links. GEO, generative engine optimisation, gets you named inside an AI-generated answer. AEO, answer engine optimisation, targets featured snippets and voice results. They overlap, but the tactics differ.
Can you actually influence what an AI says about my business?
You cannot control it any more than you control Google. You can make yourself the easiest business to quote accurately, with clear claims and clean structured data, which turns out to be most of the battle.
Is GEO real or is it just a buzzword?
Both, a bit. The acronyms are marketing. The shift underneath them is not, and you can watch it happening in your own search behaviour.
How would I know if it worked?
You ask the assistants the questions your customers ask and see whether you are named. I do that on a schedule and show you the before and after.
How much does SEO cost for a small business?
It depends on the state of the site and how competitive the area is. I quote a real number after looking at it rather than selling a package tier.
Do you require a long contract?
No. There is no minimum term. If the work is not paying for itself you should be able to stop.
Can you do SEO for HVAC and home services companies?
Yes, that is most of what I do. I plan digital strategy for home services brands at an agency by day, which means HVAC, plumbing and outdoor power equipment are the verticals I know best.
Tell me what is not working
No audit funnel and no discovery call about a discovery call. Tell me what is broken and I will tell you whether I can fix it.
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