If you’ve been in a meeting, read a marketing newsletter, or spoken to a web developer recently, you’ve probably encountered a string of acronyms that nobody bothered to explain. AEO. GEO. LLMs. Schema. They get dropped into conversations as if everyone already knows what they mean.
Here’s what they actually mean, and what each one means for your website.
SEO — Search Engine Optimisation
Worth starting here because everything else builds on it. SEO is the practice of making your website more visible in search engine results, primarily Google. It covers your content, your technical setup, how other sites link to you, and how well your site works on mobile.
If you want a grounding in what it actually involves, our on-page SEO checklist covers the fundamentals.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation
This is where things start to shift. AEO is about optimising your content so it gets picked up as a direct answer by search engines, rather than just appearing in a list of results.
You’ve seen this in action: you search something and Google gives you the answer in a highlighted box at the top of the page (a Featured Snippet), or under “People also ask.” That content didn’t get there by accident. It was written in a way that made it easy for Google to extract a clear, direct answer to a specific question.
So a florist’s blog post titled “How far in advance should I order wedding flowers?” that opens with a direct, specific answer is far more likely to surface in one of those boxes than a page that buries the answer halfway down in a wall of text.
For your website: content structured around real questions your clients ask, with clear and direct answers, is more likely to surface in these positions. FAQ sections, blog posts that answer one question well, and clear headings all help.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation
GEO is the newer cousin of AEO. Where AEO focuses on appearing in Google’s answer boxes, GEO is about appearing in the responses generated by AI tools: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, and anything similar.
When someone asks an AI chatbot “what’s the best type of accountant for a small business in South Africa?” or “how do I find a reliable electrician in Johannesburg?”, it draws on content it has indexed or can access. GEO is about making sure your content is clear, credible, well-structured, and easy for those tools to read and reference.
It’s newer territory than traditional SEO, and the rules are still developing. But the principles overlap: quality content, clear answers, credible sources, and structured data (see Schema below).
LLM — Large Language Model
This is the underlying technology behind AI chat tools. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot — all of these are built on large language models. An LLM is a type of AI trained on enormous amounts of text, which allows it to generate, summarise, and respond to language.
When people talk about “LLM search results” or “optimising for LLMs,” they mean making your content more likely to appear in or influence the responses those tools give. In practical terms, this overlaps almost entirely with GEO.
You don’t need to understand the technical mechanics. What matters is that more and more people are asking AI tools questions instead of typing searches into Google — and your content either shows up in those answers or it doesn’t.
Schema (Structured Data)
Schema isn’t an acronym — it refers to Schema.org, a shared vocabulary of structured data that you add to your website’s code. It tells search engines and AI tools exactly what something is: a business, a service, a review, a FAQ, an event, a product.
Without schema, a search engine reads your page and makes educated guesses. With schema, you’re telling it directly: “This is a hair salon. It’s located in Rosebank. It offers keratin treatments. It’s open Tuesday to Saturday. Here are 47 reviews with an average of 4.8 stars.” That precision helps both with traditional search rankings and with how AI tools represent your business.
Schema is worth having on your service pages, review sections, FAQ content, and business information. It’s a one-time setup task, not an ongoing one.
FAQ (in this context)
You know what a FAQ section is. In the context of SEO and AEO, it refers specifically to FAQ content marked up with schema — structured as discrete question-and-answer pairs in a format that search engines and AI tools can read cleanly.
A well-structured FAQ on a plumbing company’s services page — “Do you offer same-day callouts?”, “What areas do you cover?”, “What’s your call-out fee?” — does two things: it answers real questions clients have (which is useful in itself), and it makes those answers machine-readable. That increases the chances of them surfacing in featured snippets, “People also ask” boxes, and AI-generated responses.
CTA — Call to Action
This one you probably know. A CTA is the button, link, or prompt that asks a visitor to do something: get in touch, book a table, request a quote, make a purchase.
It’s worth mentioning here because AEO and GEO content often surfaces without the full context of your website around it. Someone might see your answer in a featured snippet or an AI response and never land on your site at all. When they do click through, the path from “I found this answer useful” to “I want to use this business” needs to be short and clear. A catering company whose content answers questions well but has no clear enquiry form on the page is leaving work on the table.
What this means for your website
None of this requires a complete rebuild or a new strategy from scratch. The foundations of good SEO — clear content, real expertise, proper technical setup, structured information — are the same foundations that help with AEO and GEO. The businesses that show up in AI-generated search results are, broadly, the ones that already do traditional SEO well.
What’s worth adding, if you haven’t already: schema markup on key pages, FAQ sections that answer real client questions directly, and content written to answer specific questions rather than just describe your services.
Read next
Coming up in this series: a practical guide to what you should actually do for each of these, not just what they mean. And an honest look at which of these matters for a small South African business right now versus which is still mostly noise.
In the meantime, if you want to get your SEO foundations solid first, here’s how Google actually ranks websites, and here’s the on-page checklist to work through.
Need a hand?
We look after SEO for South African small businesses, including the newer stuff. If you’d like to know where your site currently stands, have a look at our SEO services or get in touch.
