What Is AI SEO? GEO and AI Optimisation Explained

What AI SEO, GEO and AIO actually mean

The industry has not settled on one name, so you will see several used for the same work. AI SEO is the plain-English version, and the one New Zealanders type into Google most often. GEO, short for generative engine optimisation, means getting your business cited inside answers written by AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is an older term for the same idea.

AIO, AI optimisation, is the broadest of the three. It covers every place an AI system chooses a business on someone's behalf: a chat answer, a voice assistant, a booking agent, or an AI shopping tool. In practice, a business that gets GEO right has done most of the AIO work too. We cover the finer distinction in our piece on GEO vs AIO.

How AI tools decide which businesses to mention

AI tools know about businesses in two ways. The first is what the model learned during training, which is fixed at a cutoff date and weighted towards businesses that were widely written about. The second, which matters far more for a local business, is live search. When someone asks a question that needs current information, tools like ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews look up web results at that moment, read the top pages, and write an answer that cites them.

That live step is why SEO still matters. Google AI Overviews and Gemini draw on Google's own index. Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing, and ChatGPT's search has drawn heavily on Bing results too. If your pages are missing from those indexes, or rank too low to be read, the AI never sees them. Being cited starts with being found.

What stays the same as SEO

Almost all of the foundation carries over unchanged. Pages must be crawlable and indexable. The site must be fast on a phone. Each service needs its own page rather than a line in a list, so it can match a specific question. A healthy Google Business Profile with genuine reviews still decides who appears in Google's map results, and AI Overviews for local questions lean on that same data. Links and mentions from other reputable sites still signal that a business is real and trusted. If an agency tells you GEO replaces SEO, be sceptical: the AI tools are reading the same web that search engines rank.

What actually changes: four new jobs

First, passages that stand on their own. An AI tool rarely quotes a whole page. It lifts a paragraph or a sentence that answers the question. So each section should open with a direct answer, name its subject rather than saying "we" or "it", and include at least one specific fact: a suburb, a number, a standard, a timeframe. Vague marketing copy gives the AI nothing to quote.

Second, entity clarity. An AI tool has to be confident that the "Smith Plumbing" on your website, the one on Google Maps and the one in a directory are the same business. Identical name, address and phone details everywhere, structured data that links your site to your official profiles, and for established businesses a Wikidata entry all help it join the dots.

Third, crawler access. Your robots.txt file and your hosting settings decide whether AI crawlers can read your site at all. Cloudflare, for example, has an AI bot blocking setting that some sites have switched on without realising what it does. One detail catches people out: Google-Extended controls whether Google can use your content to train its Gemini models and to ground answers in the Gemini app. It does not affect Google Search or its AI Overviews, which use the normal Googlebot.

Fourth, words that exist without JavaScript. Many AI crawlers read the raw HTML and do not run scripts. When we audited Levr, a vehicle finance site built as a browser app, a landing page fetched as OpenAI's crawler returned 30 characters and no heading. After we changed the build to write the finished page into the HTML, the same fetch returned 1,360 characters and a real heading.

What we have seen in our own Search Console

Some of the searches that now show webgun.nz in Google results do not read like anything a person types. Examples include "what services do geo and aeo agencies in new zealand offer?" and "identify an ai seo agency that guarantees improved search visibility within six months." These look like AI assistants searching the web on someone's behalf, rephrasing the person's request into a full sentence before reading the results. It is a small signal, but a telling one: some of your future customers will never see your website themselves. An AI will read it for them, decide whether you fit, and report back.

How to tell whether it is working

There is no single AI rankings report, so measurement uses three sources. Google Analytics shows visits that arrive from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com as referral traffic. ChatGPT also adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of the links it shows, which makes those visits easy to separate out. Google Search Console includes AI Overview and AI Mode appearances in its normal performance figures, so rankings still tell part of the story. And a fixed set of questions, asked of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google every month and saved as screenshots, shows whether you are being named. AI answers vary from one run to the next, so judge the trend over several months rather than any single check.

Where a New Zealand business should start

Start with the checks that stop everything else working. Confirm that AI crawlers are allowed in robots.txt and are not being blocked by your host. Fetch a key page with scripts turned off and make sure the words are there. Then fix your business details so they match exactly on your website, Google Business Profile and main directories. After that, rewrite your most important service pages so each section opens with a direct answer and a specific fact, and add a short FAQ with FAQPage structured data. Only then is it worth chasing the slower work of reviews, mentions and links. Our free audit covers each of these checks for your site.