AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of getting your business named when a customer asks an AI assistant such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode or Perplexity who to hire. SEO is the work of ranking your pages when that same customer types a search into Google. Both draw on the same raw material, your website, your listings and your reviews, so a Detroit business does not have to choose. The sensible plan for 2026 is to keep the SEO basics in place, then add what AI assistants weigh more heavily: consistent facts everywhere, recent reviews, mentions on trusted third-party sites and pages that answer questions in plain sentences.
This guide covers what the terms mean, where the two overlap and differ, what the published evidence shows, and what to do first. It builds on our guide to how AI search picks local businesses, which covers each platform in detail.
Three names for one job
You will hear three labels for this work, and vendors sometimes present them as different products.
- AEO, answer engine optimization. The term that stuck for local and service businesses. It treats ChatGPT, Google’s AI features, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot as “answer engines” that return a recommendation instead of a list of links.
- GEO, generative engine optimization. The same idea with a label from research on large language models, more common among national brands.
- AI search optimization. The plain-English version most business owners say on the phone.
All three mean one task: make sure the systems that generate answers hold accurate, corroborated, quotable information about you. If an agency bills “AEO” and “GEO” separately, ask what the second invoice buys.
SEO vs AEO: the comparison
| SEO (search engine optimization) | AEO (answer engine optimization) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where answers come from | Google’s and Bing’s indexes of web pages, plus Google’s places data for the map pack | Web indexes plus licensed and third-party data: reviews, directories, “best of” lists, local media, and for ChatGPT, Yelp under a 2026 deal |
| What “ranks” | Individual pages and your Business Profile, in a numbered list and a map | Your business as an entity, named inside one written answer that usually lists three or four options |
| What the customer sees | Ten links, ads and a map pack to scan and click | One synthesized answer; fewer than one in ten clicks through, per Pew’s 2025 tracking study |
| Main signals | Relevance, distance and prominence for local; content, links and technical health for organic | Not published. Commonly studied: third-party mentions, reviews, listings and dedicated service pages; findings conflict |
| How it is measured | Search Console clicks and impressions, rank tracking, Business Profile calls and direction requests | A fixed set of buyer questions asked to each engine on a schedule, logged by who was named, plus customers telling you “ChatGPT sent me” |
| Time to results | Months for competitive terms; weeks for Business Profile fixes | Weeks for fact and description corrections; months for recommendations on competitive questions (our judgment, no platform publishes a timeline) |
| Published rules | Google publishes detailed guidance for both organic and local ranking | Google says no extra requirements beyond being indexed; OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft publish no ranking guidance for businesses |
The rows on signals and time to results are informed judgment, ours and that of the local search experts Whitespark surveys. Everything else in the table comes from the sources linked below.
What the evidence actually shows
Customers are using AI to choose businesses, and checking its work
In BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, a panel of 1,002 US adults published in February 2026, 45% of consumers said they had used ChatGPT or another generative AI tool to find local business recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier. AI is now the third most-used source for recommendations, behind Google and Facebook. In BrightLocal’s companion report on trust in AI, ChatGPT was used for recommendations by 31% of consumers and Google’s AI Mode by 23%.
The same report found that 97% of AI users at least sometimes double-check an AI recommendation against real reviews, and 42% always do. BrightLocal calls AI “a starting point for discovery rather than a replacement for reading real customer experiences.” The AI answer is the first filter; your reviews still close the sale.
When an AI answer appears, clicks fall
Pew Research Center analyzed 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, users clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% of visits.
Ahrefs reached a similar conclusion from Search Console data for 300,000 keywords: between March 2024 and March 2025, the top-ranking page’s click-through rate was 34.5% lower when an AI Overview was present than its forecast without one. Being described in the answer now matters as much as being linked beneath it.
AI answers show up for research questions, not for “plumber near me”
A Whitespark study of 540 local queries across Houston, Phoenix and Denver, published in May 2025, found AI Overviews on 15% of simple “service plus city” searches, where the local pack appeared 93% of the time. For informational questions the AI Overview rate was 92%, and for hybrid questions such as cost comparisons in a specific city it reached 97%.
The split is by intent. A customer who types “roofer Dearborn” still gets a map. A customer comparing costs or asking who is best for a specific job gets an AI answer. SEO still owns the first case. AEO increasingly decides the second.
AI referrals are few but convert well
Semrush’s July 2025 study of more than 500 marketing topics found the average visitor arriving from an AI search tool was 4.4 times as valuable as the average organic search visitor, measured by conversion rate, and projected AI search could send more visitors than traditional search for those topics by early 2028. That is one vendor’s data set, so trust the direction more than the dates: the traffic is smaller, but the people in it have already done their comparing.
Google says the rules have not changed
Google’s Search Central documentation on AI features is the one official statement any platform has made to businesses, and it is blunt: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” It adds that “you don’t need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features,” and that there is “no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.” Eligibility depends on being indexed and eligible for a snippet in regular search. The same page notes that AI-feature traffic is reported in the Search Console Performance report inside the “Web” search type, not separately.
Google’s May 2025 guidance on succeeding in AI search lists what it does recommend: unique content written for people, a fast and uncluttered page experience, pages Googlebot can reach, structured data that matches visible content, images and video alongside text, and an up-to-date Business Profile. Every item is also standard SEO.
Where the two overlap, and where they part ways
The overlap is larger than most sales pitches admit. Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey asked 47 local search experts to score factors for AI visibility for the first time. Their top five: presence on expert-curated “best of” lists, a dedicated page for each service, prominence on key industry-relevant domains, the quality of unstructured citations (mentions without a link), and the authority of the third-party sites where your reviews appear. A dedicated page per service was also the top factor for local organic rankings. The report notes that none of the experts has access to Google’s algorithm; it is informed opinion, not a specification.
What AI assistants seem to weigh more heavily, on that evidence:
- Corroboration. A business described the same way on its site, its Google and Apple profiles, Yelp, LinkedIn and two local directories gives an assistant confidence. Three versions of the address do the opposite.
- Third-party voices. Being named in a local roundup, a trade publication or a credible “best of” list matters more to an AI answer than to a map pack result. Google’s own local ranking help defines prominence as “how well-known a business is,” which points the same way.
- Quotable sentences. “Family-owned HVAC contractor serving Macomb County since 1994, with same-week furnace installs and financing” can be lifted into an answer. “Your comfort is our mission” cannot.
- Review recency and platform spread. BrightLocal found 74% of consumers look for reviews from the last three months, and 31% will only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher, up from 17% in 2025. ChatGPT now carries Yelp’s reviews and ratings in its local answers under a non-exclusive deal announced July 23, 2026, as reported by Search Engine Land. A Yelp page you abandoned in 2019 is now part of your AI footprint.
Does your Detroit business need AEO?
This is judgment, not data, so here is how we would call it.
You probably need it now if customers compare options before buying and the ticket is large: contractors and builders, developers and property managers, hotels and venues, law and accounting firms, manufacturers selling to other companies, and agencies. These are the “who should I hire for X in Detroit” questions where AI answers appear most often and name only a few companies.
It is a lower priority if most customers arrive by proximity and habit: a coffee shop on a busy corner, a neighborhood barber, a party store. Your Google Business Profile and reviews do most of the work in both search and AI.
Check before spending anything. Write down ten questions a customer would ask, in their words, and ask each one in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity while signed out. If you are named and described accurately, you have no urgent AEO problem. If a competitor is named and you are not, or the answer repeats a wrong address or a service you dropped, you have found the gap. That hour is worth more than any audit sold unseen.
What to do first, in order
The order matters because each step feeds the next.
- Make your facts identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, founding year, service list and service area, the same on your website, your structured data, Google Business Profile, Apple Business, Yelp, Facebook, LinkedIn and any trade directory. Half a day of work for most businesses, and it removes the most common reason an assistant describes you wrong.
- Complete your Google Business Profile. Primary and secondary categories, every service with a description, accurate hours including holidays, and current photos and video of your space, team and work. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up. Our guide to Business Profile photos and video has the shot list.
- Build a review flow you can sustain. Ask every customer, make it a one-tap link, reply to every review, and spread the asks across Google and Yelp. Never pay for reviews or reward only positive ones; the federal rules are in our guide to FTC rules for reviews and influencer posts.
- Write one page per service, answer first. State what you do, who it is for, where you do it and what it involves in the first paragraph, then answer the five or six questions customers ask before booking. Experts ranked this factor second for AI visibility and first for local organic, and most Detroit small-business sites skip it in favor of a single “Services” page.
- Earn mentions you do not control. Pitch local roundups, trade publications and neighborhood media with a real story and good photos. Apply for the lists and awards your industry respects. Ask suppliers and partners who already like you to name you. This step is slow, and it separates businesses that get named from businesses that get found.
Then measure. Once a month, ask the same ten questions to the same engines and log who was named and what was said about you. Because Search Console blends AI traffic into regular web numbers, this log plus your Business Profile call and direction data are the honest measures. Ask every new customer how they found you; “ChatGPT” is now a real answer, and worth counting.
What not to buy
- An llms.txt file or “AI schema.” Google says it is not needed, and no other platform has published a requirement for one. A vendor who leads with it is selling the easiest deliverable, not the useful one.
- Guaranteed placement. No engine publishes a ranking formula, and answers vary by wording, location, user history and even by run. A guarantee is a sign the vendor does not check its own results.
- AEO sold separately from the content. Most of the fix list above is content work: photos, video, written pages, a story worth covering. An audit that tells you to produce those things and then leaves is half a service. Our guide to choosing a marketing agency in Detroit has the questions that expose this.
- Chasing every engine. Google’s AI features, ChatGPT and Perplexity cover most of the audience BrightLocal measured. Get those right first.
The short version. SEO gets you indexed and ranked. AEO gets you named. The same five steps serve both, and no file, tag or vendor can skip them.
How we handle this at RAW Digital Group
RAW Digital Group offers AEO to Detroit and Michigan businesses, scoped to the market and the services you want named. No one can guarantee placement, and we do not. See our AI search optimization (AEO) service, or tell us what customers should be asking AI about your business.