A business owner asked us last month whether they needed to add GEO to their marketing. They had been told their SEO was no longer enough, that they needed to add AEO, and that GEO would be the next thing that mattered.
Three acronyms. Three quotes. No clear sense of what they would actually be buying.
Giphy
That question comes up enough that it is worth answering plainly. And it leads to another question sitting underneath all of this: can you use AI to write website content without getting your business in trouble with Google?
Start with the acronyms
SEO, search engine optimization, is the work that makes your website easy to find and worth finding. It includes content that answers real questions, pages that load, accurate information, and credible sources pointing back to your business.
AEO, answer engine optimization, describes showing up when a search gives someone an answer instead of a list of links. Google’s AI results are the most familiar example.
GEO, generative engine optimization, describes showing up when someone asks an AI assistant directly: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Copilot.
Here is the part that gets lost: AEO and GEO describe specific visibility outcomes. The work to improve those outcomes can add to an SEO program. It does not become a separate discipline just because it has a new acronym.
Why we call all of it SEO
Your website is still central. So are your Google Business Profile, directory listings, reviews, supplier pages, trade publications, and forum conversations. Different search and AI products use different systems and source sets, but they are all trying to determine whether the information about your business is accurate, useful, and credible.
That is why we put the work under SEO instead of splitting it into three disconnected services. There may be additional work: checking how a business appears in AI answers, improving the information those systems can find, and addressing gaps beyond the website. But it is still part of the same job: helping the right people find accurate, useful information about your business.
Google now says this directly: for its generative AI features, SEO fundamentals remain the foundation. It also says you do not need AI-specific files like llms.txt, tiny “chunks” of content, or inauthentic mentions to show up in Google Search’s AI features.
What has changed is how people can find you.
A ranking is your position on a list of search results. Someone searches, compares options, and chooses. Improving the page itself is a major part of improving that outcome.
A citation is when an AI answer includes or names your business while responding to a question. That answer may draw on your pages and on other material across the web. Your own content still matters, but it is not the only information shaping the answer.
So a good website is necessary, but it may not be sufficient. If your hours, services, pricing, or reputation are unclear or inconsistent elsewhere, AI answers can miss you or get a detail wrong. Addressing those gaps is real work. We see it as part of SEO: clear, useful information on your site and consistent, credible information everywhere your business appears.
Where AI comes into this
Two different things get called “AI in SEO.”
The first is AI doing the reading and answering. That changed where your information can appear.
The second is AI doing the writing. That is the question that makes most business owners nervous.
Maybe someone on your team uses AI to draft blog posts. Maybe it is an agency. Maybe it is you at 11 p.m. because the blog has not been touched since March.
The question is simple: is this going to get us in trouble with Google?
Short answer: no, not because AI helped write it. But that is not permission to hand your website to a prompt and walk away.
AI can speed up a first draft. It cannot decide which customer questions matter most, supply your real experience, verify a claim, make your information consistent across the web, or recognize when a page is saying nothing new. Those are the parts that require a strategy and someone who knows the business well enough to make a call.
Google’s position on AI-written content
Google’s guidance on AI-generated content says:
“Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines.”
It also says:
“not all use of automation, including AI generation, is spam.”
Google has not reversed that position. Its newer guidance is equally clear: if you use generative AI to help create content, the finished work still needs to meet Search Essentials and Google’s spam policies.
What actually gets penalized
Google’s spam policies include scaled content abuse: producing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings rather than help people. The policy applies no matter how the content was made.
That means a room full of freelancers publishing 400 thin pages a month can violate the policy. So can a script. The problem is volume, originality, value, and intent. It is not simply which tool typed the first draft.
Google’s quality-rater guidelines caused some of the confusion. They say a page can receive the lowest rating when nearly all of its main content is copied, paraphrased, auto- or AI-generated, or reposted with little to no effort, originality, or added value.
That last part matters. A human-written page that repeats the same generic advice as ten other sites can fail the same test. AI can help produce a draft, but it cannot replace the research, firsthand input, editorial judgment, and review that turn a draft into something your business should stand behind.
What this asks of you
Strip away the acronyms and the update chatter, and the job is fairly old-fashioned. Search results and AI answers are both trying to establish three things: Is this accurate? Is it useful? Is there a real business behind it?
That puts the work in three places.
Someone needs to be accountable for what goes live. A named person should read the page before it publishes and be able to answer for it afterward. That is not a Google ranking factor. It is the practical safeguard that keeps AI from becoming an unattended publishing machine.
The experience has to hold up. The page should load, work on a phone, answer the question near the top, and make it easy for a visitor to contact you.
The information has to be worth having. Use your own prices, service area, photos, process, and answers to the questions customers actually ask on the phone. Do not publish a slightly rearranged version of what is already on ten other sites.
Six questions worth ten minutes
Run these against your site as it stands today:
Can you name the person who read your last published page before it went live?
How many pages went up last month, and could that person have read all of them?
Does any page on your site exist for a search engine rather than for a customer?
If you removed the keyword, would the page still have a reason to exist?
Do your hours, service area, and pricing match across your website, Google Business Profile, and directory listings?
Does anyone besides you say what you say about your business?
If you moved through the first four easily and stalled on the last two, that is common. The last two are not solved by writing more. They are about whether your information agrees with itself everywhere it appears and whether other credible sources back it up.
Those are the first six of the ten checks in our pre-publish review. They diagnose the foundation: whether your site and wider web presence are in good shape. The last four are page-level checks that help you decide whether a specific piece of content is ready to publish.
AI is not the problem. Unreviewed, generic content is.
Get the full ten-check pre-publish review: six questions about the foundation, plus four checks for the page in front of you.
-Iulia
