SEO is competing for a position in a list of links. AEO — answer engine optimisation — is competing to be quoted inside a single generated answer. The first gives the customer ten options. The second usually gives them two or three, and no scroll.

That compression is the whole point. Ranking eighth on Google still earns some traffic. Being the eighth-best source for an AI assistant earns nothing, because the answer stopped at three.

What assistants actually do when they answer

An assistant answering "who builds e-commerce sites in Nairobi" does roughly this: it interprets the question, fetches candidate pages, extracts facts it can stand behind, and writes an answer citing a few sources. Each of those steps has a failure mode you control.

• It fetches your page without running JavaScript. If your content only appears after a script executes, the assistant sees an almost empty page.
• It looks for unambiguous facts. "We are a leading provider of solutions" tells it nothing. "An independent software agency in Nairobi, Kenya, founded in 2019, working across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania" tells it everything.
• It prefers content shaped like an answer. A page that poses a question and answers it directly is far easier to quote than a brochure paragraph.
• It checks whether the claim is corroborated. A business that appears consistently across its own site, its structured data and third-party listings is safer to cite than one that appears once.

Why this is unusually winnable in Kenya right now

Most Kenyan business sites fail the first test outright. They are built on page builders that render client-side, carry no structured data, and describe themselves in marketing language that contains no extractable facts. An assistant asked a local question often has thin material to work with.

That is an opening. The work required is unglamorous and mostly technical, which is precisely why few competitors have done it.

What to actually do

1. Make sure your content is in the HTML the server sends, not assembled by JavaScript afterwards. Test by viewing source, not by looking at the page.
2. Add structured data: Organization, LocalBusiness, and Service markup that states who you are, where you are and what you sell in a format a machine reads without interpretation.
3. Write pages that answer real questions in the first two sentences. Put the answer first and the context after — the opposite of how most marketing copy is written.
4. State concrete, checkable facts: cities served, languages spoken, response times, what you do not do.
5. Give each service its own page and its own address. One page describing five services can only ever be cited as one generic source.
6. Publish an llms.txt describing your business and your key pages, and allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt deliberately rather than by accident.

How you will know it is working

You will not see it in Google Analytics, because an assistant reading your page is not a session. Check it directly: ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, in the words they would use, and see who gets named. Repeat monthly. That is the scoreboard.

It is a slower signal than a rankings report, and a more honest one.

The oldest and still the largest. The goal is a position in a results page: relevant content, a site that loads quickly and renders on a phone, sensible titles and descriptions, links from places that matter, and no technical obstacles between the crawler and your content.

SEO is not dead, despite the yearly claim that it is. Most commercial queries still end in a click on a link.

AEO — answer engine optimisation

The goal is being quoted in a generated answer rather than listed. The work overlaps with SEO — an assistant cannot cite a page it cannot read — but diverges in emphasis.

Where SEO rewards a page that is comprehensive, AEO rewards a page that is extractable. A clear answer stated in two sentences, backed by structured data, beats two thousand words that bury it.

GEO — generative engine optimisation

Here is where the honesty is required: in most usage, GEO and AEO describe the same work. GEO is the term that spread through academic and enterprise writing; AEO spread through SEO agencies. If someone quotes you separately for both, ask what differs.

One genuine distinction is worth keeping. GEO is also used for the geographic side — local visibility, "near me" searches, map results. That work is real and separate: a claimed business profile, a consistent name, address and phone number everywhere, LocalBusiness structured data, and reviews.

SEO vs AEO vs GEO at a glance

What overlaps, and what does not

• Shared by all three: content in server-sent HTML, fast loading, clear structure, genuine expertise.
• SEO only: link acquisition, competing for high-volume head terms, ranking-position reporting.
• AEO and GEO only: structured data as a first-class deliverable, answer-shaped content, monitoring what assistants say about you.
• Local GEO only: business profile, map presence, NAP consistency, review management.

The practical order

Fix the foundation first, because all three depend on it. If your content is not in the HTML, or your site takes four seconds to load, or you have one URL for five pages of content, nothing else you buy will work.

Then add structured data, which is cheap and serves AEO and local GEO at once. Then publish content that answers real questions. Link acquisition comes last, and it is the part most agencies sell first.

A reasonable question to ask any agency

Ask them to show you their own site. Check whether it has a sitemap, structured data, a page per service, and content in the source. An agency that has not done this for itself is selling you something it has not tested.

Not on office Wi-Fi. Turn Wi-Fi off and load your homepage on a normal connection. Count the seconds until you can read something and tap something.

If it takes more than about three seconds, you are losing people before the site has said a word. Most visitors in Kenya arrive on a phone, often on a connection that is nothing like your office.

2. View the page source and search for your own sentences

Right-click, View Page Source, then search for a sentence from your homepage. If it is not there, your content is being assembled by JavaScript after the page loads.

Search engines mostly cope with this. AI assistants largely do not. If your text is not in the source, you are invisible to the tools an increasing number of customers now ask first.

3. Count how many clicks it takes to contact you

From the homepage, how many taps to reach a phone number that dials? If the answer is more than one, you are asking a ready customer to work for it. Phone numbers should be tappable links, not images or plain text.

4. Search Google for your business name plus your city

Look at what appears. Is it your site, or a directory listing, or a competitor? Does the description underneath read like something you wrote, or has Google invented one from stray page text because you never set a meta description?

That snippet is often the first sentence anyone reads about you. It is worth controlling.

5. Ask an AI assistant about your industry in your city

Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity the question a customer would ask — "who supplies commercial tyres in Nairobi", or whatever fits your business. See whether you are named, and whether what it says about you is correct.

If you are absent, that is a growing share of demand you are not in. If you are present but described wrongly, that is worse, and it is fixable.

6. Send your link to someone on WhatsApp

Watch what preview appears. A blank grey box, or the wrong image, or no description, is how your link looks every single time anyone shares it. That preview is set by a few lines of metadata that take minutes to fix and are missing from most sites.

What to do with the results

If you failed one or two of these, they are quick, specific fixes. If you failed four or more, the problem is structural — usually a site built for how it looks rather than how it is found — and patching individual items will not move much.

Either way, the checks above cost nothing and nobody needs to sell them to you. Run them before you buy anything.