SEO vs AEO
Search behaviour has split in two. Some people still scroll a list of results, and a growing number just ask an assistant and act on the first answer. You need to win both.
Google's AI Overviews now sit above the normal results for a large share of searches, and millions of people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity directly instead of searching at all.
In those answers there is no page two. Usually two or three businesses are named, and everyone else is invisible regardless of where they rank.
SEO optimises for position: keywords, links, page speed, site structure. AEO optimises for citation: clear factual statements, structured data, consistent business information across the web, and content written the way people actually phrase questions.
The two overlap heavily, which is why we run them together rather than selling them as separate projects.
Almost no South African small business is doing this deliberately yet. The businesses that structure their content properly this year are likely to be the default recommendation in their category for some time.
It is the same opportunity local SEO offered a decade ago, and it will close the same way.
No. Traditional search still drives most traffic, and AI answers are frequently assembled from pages that already rank well. AEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it.
Partly. We track how the major assistants describe your business and your category over time, and monitor referral traffic from AI tools. It is less precise than rank tracking, and we say so.
Especially well. Local answers draw on a small pool of sources, so a properly structured site can become the standard answer for a suburb or town quickly.
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