SEO, GEO, AEO, AI SEO… and the business of confusion

More and more enquiries coming into Go Up are asking specifically about AI visibility. Sometimes they don’t mention Google at all.

People are using ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI platforms themselves. They’re seeing a different way to find products and services. Then someone in their business asks: “What are we doing about this?”

That is a perfectly sensible question. What concerns me is how our industry sometimes answers it.

SEO. GEO. AEO. AI SEO. We haven’t even settled on what to call the work, and already businesses are being asked to decide which version they need to buy.

One campaign: organic discoverability

Our position at Go Up is that this belongs in one campaign: organic discoverability. The platforms differ, and there is work involved in understanding and measuring those differences. But much of what makes a business discoverable is the same work we have been doing for years.

Can you succinctly and coherently describe what you offer? Can you explain what makes it different from your competitors? And is what you say about yourself being validated by people who aren’t you?

Does the industry press talk about you in a way that matches your own positioning? Do your customers’ experiences support your claims?

These are familiar questions. Adding a new initialism doesn’t make them a completely separate service.

Why we have an AI SEO service page

At Go Up, we have an AI SEO service page. We also present AI visibility results separately from our traditional SEO results. That might sound contradictory, but there is a straightforward reason.

It is what people are looking for.

If someone is searching for an AI SEO agency, we need a page that speaks to that enquiry. Once we are talking, we can explain how we approach the work and where it overlaps with SEO.

Separate routes into a conversation don’t have to mean separate campaigns once you get there.

What are you paying for twice?

What bothers me is the possibility that a business buys both without understanding how much of the work is shared. There can be legitimate additional costs: reporting, tools, research and work specific to a platform. Those should be explained.

If you are being charged separately, ask what additional work you are getting. An agency should be able to answer that plainly.

AI has made organic search interesting again

I’m not arguing that nothing has changed. In fact, I’m grateful for some of the change.

SEO was the industry that everyone rolled their eyes at.

That is how it often felt, anyway. There was a reputation for mysterious techniques and work that clients were expected to pay for without really understanding. Some of that reputation was earned.

Now organic discoverability feels interesting again. People are having conversations with search platforms. They can explain their circumstances, add constraints and refine what they want. As someone who runs an agency working in this area, I find that exciting.

What prompt data can tell us

It also creates a new appetite for information. Businesses want to know what people are asking AI, how often they are asking it and whether their brand appears in the answers.

Platforms such as Profound and Peec AI are responding to that demand. We should be precise about what their numbers represent. Profound says it uses real conversations from opted-in consumer panels, then models the data to estimate patterns across the wider population. Peec describes a volume metric scored from one to five. These are different measures, and neither should simply be read as an exact count of everyone asking a particular question.

That doesn’t make the information useless. It means we need to understand it before making decisions with it.

Understand the needs behind the prompt

Consider a pair of jeans.

A conventional search might be “wide leg blue jeans”. In a conversation with an AI assistant, someone might say:

“I’m looking for a pair of jeans that would work comfortably in the office as well as on a night out. I don’t want to spend more than £150, and I’d like them a little bit frayed at the bottom.”

How many people ask exactly that? How many express the same needs in a different order, across several messages, or without mentioning the office?

For me, the useful next step is to break down what that person is telling us.

They want blue jeans. They have a budget. They want a particular finish. They want something appropriate for work and for going out.

Those individual needs matter, as does the combination. Someone else might want the same jeans for a party without caring whether they can wear them to work.

If a client sells a pair that genuinely meets those requirements, I want to look at their website and ask: are you communicating any of this?

Can someone understand the fit, the finish, the price and when they might wear them? Or are we expecting a customer, a search engine or an AI assistant to work it all out from a photograph and a product name?

That is where the information becomes useful. It helps us understand what matters to the audience and whether the business is explaining its product properly.

We don’t need to create a page for every possible sentence someone might type. We need to understand the needs behind those sentences and make sure the relevant information is there.

To me, that is very familiar marketing work.

Start by being a better business

Increasingly, the conversations we have with clients extend beyond their website. We talk about their product, their service, their niche and the experience they give customers. Sometimes it feels closer to business consultancy.

I often say that the best place to start is by being a better business. Improve your product. Improve your service. Treat your customers well. Find your niche and own it.

That doesn’t guarantee visibility, and it doesn’t remove the practical work of making a website accessible and its content understandable. But it gives that work something substantial to communicate.

There should be a clear connection between what a business claims, what it delivers and what other people say about it.

AI search will keep changing, and I’m conscious that anything written about it can date painfully quickly. Our approach will need to evolve with it.

But changing search habits don’t automatically mean a business needs to buy the same underlying work twice.

Know your product. Make your product better. Explain it properly. Make sure people have good reason to talk about you.

Whatever we end up calling the service, that is the work I want us to be doing.