AEO and GEO for small business blogs in 2026

Updated October 2026. I first wrote this post in October 2025, when I argued keywords were dying. A year later the picture is clearer, and some of my old take was wrong, so I rewrote it.

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) both mean the same practical thing for a small business blog: writing pages that AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews can find, trust and cite.

Here’s what actually matters, what doesn’t, and what I’d do this week if I ran a small business blog.

AI answers now sit between you and the click

Pew Research tracked real Google users in 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a regular search result in 8% of visits. Without one, they clicked in 15% of visits. They clicked a link inside the AI summary itself in just 1% of visits. (Pew Research Center)

So fewer people reach your site from a search. The ones who do have usually read an AI answer first, and that answer may have quoted you, a competitor, or nobody you’ve heard of.

The goal shifts a little. You still want the click. You also want to be the source the answer is built from.

What AEO and GEO mean

The term GEO comes from a research paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues at IIT Delhi, Princeton and elsewhere, accepted at KDD 2024. They built a benchmark of real queries and tested ways to make a page show up more in AI-generated answers. The best methods raised visibility by up to 40%. Adding statistics and quotations from credible sources performed strongly. Keyword stuffing, the classic SEO move, didn’t help. (Aggarwal et al., arXiv)

AEO is the older, broader name for the same goal: structure content so an engine can lift a clear answer from it.

You’ll see both terms used interchangeably. I’ll use GEO from here on.

Google says there’s no secret AI Overviews trick

This was the part I got most wrong a year ago. I made it sound like a whole new discipline.

Google’s own documentation says the opposite. The best practices for SEO still apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode. There are no additional requirements and no special optimizations. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and that’s the technical bar. Google also says you don’t need special AI text files or schema markup to appear. (Google Search Central)

That’s good news for small businesses. The work is the fundamentals, done well, on more pages, more often.

Step 1: Let the AI crawlers in

You can’t be cited if the bots can’t read you.

• ChatGPT uses OAI-SearchBot to show sites in ChatGPT search. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot won’t appear in ChatGPT search answers. (OpenAI)
• Claude uses ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, and Anthropic documents how each one works and how to block it. (Anthropic)
• Google uses the same Googlebot it always has.

Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and check none of those are blocked. Then check your security settings. Firewalls and bot protection from your host can challenge crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.

Step 2: Answer the question in the first lines

AI tools pull the clearest answer they can find. Put yours in the first two sentences of the post, then explain.

Write each H2 as the actual question a customer asks or as a point you’re making. “How much does a roof repair cost in Boise?” beats “Pricing considerations” every time.

Keep paragraphs short. One idea each. It’s easier for a reader on a phone, and easier for a model to quote cleanly.

Step 3: Back every number with a source

This lines up with the GEO paper’s findings, and it’s honest writing.

When you state a number, link where it came from. When you quote someone, name them. A page full of unsourced claims gives an AI tool no reason to trust it over the next page.

If you don’t have a source for a number, cut the number. Invented statistics are worse than none.

Step 4: Stop chasing keyword density

Keywords tell you what people search for. Use them to pick and title a post, then write for the reader.

Google lists keyword stuffing as spam. (Google spam policies) A page that repeats the phrase every other sentence is painful to read and gets demoted anyway.

What I do now: put the main keyword in the title, the first 100 words, one heading and the meta description. Then write for the question. There’s no density target. The full set of rules we check is on our SEO copywriting rules page.

There’s a line from The Newsroom, one of my favorite shows, that sums up keyword-first content perfectly:

That sounds like ratings driving content to me.

MacKenzie McHale says it about cable news. Blogs have the same problem. The reader’s question should decide what gets written.

Step 5: Publish things nobody else has

AI answers lean on sources that add something. Original data, real examples from your own customers, prices from your actual quotes, photos of your actual work.

For us, that meant running a benchmark. We tested 14 AI models on the same blog and copywriting briefs and published every score. You can see it on the best AI for writing page. It’s the kind of page a model can cite because the data exists nowhere else.

A small business can do this at a smaller scale. A roofer can publish what the last 50 repair jobs cost. A dentist can explain the three questions every new patient asks.

Step 6: Make your site easy to understand

Use clear titles, one H1 per page, descriptive headings and an accurate meta description. Add basic structured data like Organization and Article if your platform supports it.

Some sites also publish an llms.txt file, a proposed standard that gives AI tools a plain-text map of your site. (llmstxt.org) Google says it doesn’t need one, so treat it as a cheap extra. We publish one at draftly.blog/llms.txt.

Step 7: Measure what you can

Google counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the normal Search Console Performance report, under the Web search type. (Google Search Central) So Search Console is still the first place to look.

For ChatGPT and Claude, watch your referral traffic in Google Analytics, and ask new customers how they found you. “ChatGPT recommended you” is now a real answer.

How Draftly fits

I built Draftly to do steps 2 through 6 on every post without you thinking about them.

• It checks every draft against writing rules in code: answer first, headings that make a point, keyword in a few natural places, and no invented numbers.
• It links only to real pages on your site and to sources that actually load.
• Paid plans include a connector for Claude and ChatGPT with read-only SEO tools, so you can research topics inside the assistant you already use. More on the MCP page.

Your first post is free. See how the whole process works on the AI copywriter page, or compare plans on the pricing page.

What’s the question your customers ask most that your website doesn’t answer yet?