Optimising your digital marketing: understanding SEO, GEO, GSO & AEO

Digital marketing is an essential part of your promotional activity as a small business. But with technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital channels evolving at a dizzying pace, there’s a pressing need to keep up to date with new ways of boosting your online engagement.

Let’s look at four different ways of being found online: search engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation, generative search optimisation and answer engine optimisation.

1. Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps you optimise your website content, giving it a chance of ranking more highly in traditional search engine results pages, like Google.

By using specific keywords, high-quality backlinks and good technical site performance, your small business can attract organic traffic to your site. Where online users are actively searching for relevant products or services, good SEO will help your pages and links appear higher in the search results from search engines – improving your chances of engagement.

2. Generative engine optimisation (GEO)

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is an emerging strategy designed to make content more visible and ‘citable’ by AI-powered search engines, like Claude, Perplexity or Google’s Gemini.

Unlike traditional SEO, GEO prioritises brand authority, expert quotes and structured data to make sure your content is included in the synthesised, conversational answers generated by AI. In essence, good GEO helps position you and your content as an authority, making it more likely that your links will appear in AI-based searches.

3. Generative search optimisation (GSO)

Generative search optimisation (GSO) is a broader strategic framework that manages how your brand appears across all generative AI platforms, including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Google Gemini.

GSO differs from SEO and GEO by focusing on ‘LLM literacy’. This ensures your business’s data is correctly interpreted and recommended by AI models during user interactions – increasing your chances of click-throughs, conversions and online sales revenues.

4. Answer engine optimisation (AEO)

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of optimising your content specifically for voice assistants and ‘zero-click’ search results that provide immediate answers.

AEO differs from SEO, GEO and GSO by prioritising extremely concise, conversational language and FAQ-style formatting. This improves the chances of your information being the direct response spoken by devices like Alexa or Siri.

Ecommerce sales in 2026 are expected to make up 21.1% of total retail sales, according to recent statistics from Shopify. And by 2028, that number will grow to 22.5%.

eCommerce and online sales should be a vital element of your business strategy, going forward. So, there’s real value in updating your digital marketing strategy to include not just SEO, but also GEO, GSO and AEO – so you’re reaching every single potential online customer.