The three words, plainly
- SEO, search engine optimisation: being high in the list of links a search engine shows
- AEO, answer engine optimisation: being named, and ideally cited, inside the written answer
- GEO, generative engine optimisation: the same as AEO, phrased for tools that write the answer from scratch, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity
AEO and GEO are two names for one job and you can use them interchangeably without losing anything. We use AEO because it is the phrase clients here say out loud.
Where they part company
- Position stops mattering. Semrush found ChatGPT search cites pages ranking 21st or worse almost 90% of the time (Semrush, July 2025)
- Specifics beat keywords. A price in AED, a duration, a licence number or a neighbourhood is what makes a sentence quotable
- Being right matters more than being persuasive, because a machine will not repeat a claim it cannot support
- The unit of success is a mention in an answer, not a click, since about 60% of searches now end with no click at all (Bain and Company, February 2025)
- Measurement changes completely: you count named-in answers across a fixed prompt set, not positions in a rank tracker
Fewer visitors, better visitors
The trade is not all bad. Traffic arriving from AI sources converted 54% better than traffic from non-AI sources in Adobe's analysis of retail sites (Adobe Analytics via Digital Commerce 360, June 2026), and Semrush put the average value of a visitor from a large language model at 4.4 times an ordinary organic search visitor (Semrush, July 2025).
Why the UAE is ahead of this curve
This is not a future problem here. 64% of working age people in the UAE used AI in 2025, the highest share of any country (Microsoft AI Economy Institute, January 2026), 97% of UAE residents surveyed have used AI for work, study or daily life, and 65% said they would rely on information an AI system gives them (KPMG and University of Melbourne, October 2025).
Meanwhile Google, where 95.8% of UAE searches happen (Statcounter, August 2026), answers first in both English and Arabic. The audience and the surface are both already here.
What to do first
- Measure where you are: 10 buyer questions, three tools, fresh logged-out sessions, dated screenshots
- Fix the facts: listings, structured data, name and address consistency in English and Arabic
- Write the pages that answer the questions, one service and one city at a time, with AED prices
- Keep reviews arriving every month and reply to all of them
- Re-measure monthly and only then argue about which acronym you are doing
That order works whether you call it AEO, GEO or plain good housekeeping. If you want the first month done for you, the free AI visibility check covers the measurement step and you keep the screenshots.
What each one measures
The clearest way to tell the three apart is to look at the report each one produces at the end of the month.
- SEO reports positions, impressions, clicks and the pages that earned them
- AEO and GEO report how many of a fixed set of questions named you, in which tools, on which date, with the screenshots attached
- SEO improves when a page moves from position nine to position three
- AEO improves when a business goes from named in two answers out of thirty to named in eleven
Both reports can be true at once, and they often disagree in an instructive way. A page can sit at position 30 and still be the page ChatGPT quotes, which is exactly what Semrush found when it looked at cited pages (Semrush, July 2025). If your agency cannot show you the second report, they are not doing the second job.
Who should own this in your business
Not your web developer, unless they also write. Most of the work is facts and words: what you charge, what you do, where you do it, who says so. The technical part is one afternoon of structured data.
In a small UAE business the right owner is usually the person who answers the enquiry calls, because they already know the ten questions buyers ask and the words they use. Give that person three hours a month and the checklist below, and you will get further than most retainers do.
One warning about the words themselves. New acronyms attract new pricing, and in the UAE we already see AEO packages that are last year's SEO retainer with a different cover page. The test is not the label, it is the report: a fixed prompt list, three tools, fresh logged-out sessions, dated screenshots and a count of answers that named you. If that is missing, the acronym is decoration.