SEO, AEO, GEO and AI SEO in Chicago

SEO, AEO, GEO and AI SEO: what each term means

SEO is short for search engine optimization. Google's SEO starter guide describes it as helping search engines understand your content and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it. The same guide says there are no secrets that will automatically rank a site first, and that good practice makes a site easier for search engines in general, not only Google, to crawl, index and understand.^[1]

AEO and GEO are newer labels. Google's guide to generative AI features explains that AEO stands for answer engine optimization and GEO for generative engine optimization, calls both terms you may see used for work aimed at AI search visibility, and says that from Google Search's perspective this is still SEO. Bing's Webmaster Guidelines use the word GEO themselves and describe it as work on content eligibility for grounding and reference in AI responses. Bing adds that SEO does not promise rankings or traffic and that GEO does not promise grounding or citations.^[3],[17]

The label GEO has an academic origin. A 2023 research paper on arXiv, accepted to KDD 2024, proposed generative engine optimization as a framework for improving a site's visibility in generative engine responses. Its abstract reports that the methods boosted visibility by up to 40% on the authors' own benchmark, and that the results vary by domain. That is a research result, not a statement about how any assistant treats your business today. Google's 2026 guide lists several popular AEO and GEO tactics that it says you can ignore for Google Search (see the structured data section below).^[24],[3]

Sources: ^{[1],[2],[3],[17],[24]}

• Be found

  Crawlable, indexable pages with working links, a sitemap and clean redirects.

• Be understood

  Clear content about one topic per page, named entities and structured data that matches the page.

• Be chosen

  Accurate titles, a verified Business Profile and reviews collected by the rules.

• Be measured

  Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools reports, with their limits stated.

The shared foundation: crawlable, indexable, useful pages

Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimization. To be shown as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, and Google adds that indexing and serving are not assured even when every requirement is met. Its generative AI guide explains that these features retrieve pages from the regular Search index and may use query fan-out, a set of related searches across subtopics.^[2],[3]

• Let crawlers in. Check robots.txt and any CDN or hosting layer. Remember that robots.txt manages crawling and does not keep a page out of results; use noindex for that.^[2],[17]
• Link every important page from other pages with standard links so it can be found, and keep important content in text, not only in images or in blocks that depend on client-side rendering.^[2],[17]
• One URL per piece of content. Duplicate content is not a spam violation in Google's words, but it wastes crawling. Bing asks for 301 redirects for permanent moves and 302 redirects only for very short-term changes, less than 2 days.^[1],[17]
• Write real titles and descriptions. Bing says missing, duplicate or overly short titles and meta descriptions may reduce indexing reliability and eligibility for citations. Google says titles and descriptions shape how your result looks.^[1],[17]
• Keep pages fast and stable. Google names three Core Web Vitals, LCP, INP and CLS, with targets of LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds and CLS under 0.1, and recommends good scores for success with Search. It does not say they assure rankings. Speed work is covered on our WordPress cleanup and speed page.^[15]
• Verify the site in Search Console to find and diagnose technical problems quickly.^[2]

Timing needs realistic expectations. Google's starter guide says a change can take effect in a few hours or take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped. Not every change produces a visible effect.^[1]

Content is the lever Google names first. It says content people find unique, compelling and useful will likely influence presence in generative AI search more than any other suggestion in its guide. It separates commodity content, built on common knowledge that could come from anyone, from non-commodity content that adds first-hand or expert experience. It also says there is no ideal page length, and no need to cut pages into tiny pieces or rewrite them only for AI systems.^[3]

Google's people-first guidance asks who created the content, how it was produced and why. It suggests clear authorship and a note about automation or AI where readers would reasonably expect one. It also says E-E-A-T is not itself a ranking factor, though trust is the most important of its parts, and the starter guide lists the belief that E-E-A-T is a ranking factor among the things not to focus on.^[8],[1]

AI helps us draft, test and audit faster. A person approves what goes live.

Structured data, llms.txt and AI crawler controls

Structured data is a standardized format for describing a page. Google recommends JSON-LD, says most Search structured data uses the schema.org vocabulary, and uses markup to understand page content and entities such as people, books and companies. It does not promise rich results, and Google says no special schema.org markup is needed for its AI features. Markup should match the visible text. Schema.org describes itself as a collection of shared vocabularies for marking up pages, designed to be understood by the major search engines.^[5],[25],[2]

FAQ markup is no longer a route to a Google rich result. Google's changelog says the FAQ rich result stopped appearing in Google Search from May 7, 2026, and that its documentation was removed in June 2026. Bing says structured data may support clearer grounding but promises no visibility, and that markup must accurately reflect visible content. We write FAQ sections because readers ask those questions, not to chase a search feature.^[4],[17]

llms.txt is a proposal, first published in September 2024, for a Markdown file at a site's root that gives AI agents a short overview and links to detail. The proposal page does not say that any AI company or search engine has committed to use it. Google's guide says Google Search does not use llms.txt or similar files, ignores them, and that having one neither helps nor harms visibility in Google Search. Google added that clarification on June 15, 2026. We still publish llms.txt on the sites we build, for services that read it, and we do not claim it changes Google results.^[26],[3],[4]

Sources: ^{[2],[16],[17],[21],[22]}

Which crawlers to allow is a business decision, not a ranking trick. Blocking a search crawler removes you from that product's answers, so allowing it is a precondition for appearing, not a promise of it. Blocking a training crawler is a separate choice. OpenAI says robots.txt changes can take about 24 hours to take effect for its search results. We set the rules per crawler after you decide.^{[21],[22],[17]}

Sites we publish run on CMS MESH 5.1 (Media Express Static Hub), our new-generation manual CMS: ultra-fast static HTML pages edited by hand, no database, no plugins to update, with an AI-ready structure of schema, llms.txt and sitemap. Our hand-verified QC checks each page for a canonical link, a robots meta tag, Open Graph tags and JSON-LD, checks bilingual English and Polish pages for hreflang, and checks each domain for a sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt. Details are on our CMS MESH page.

Local SEO in Chicago: Business Profile, reviews and city pages

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence (the opening sentence of its help page says popularity, a later heading says prominence). Prominence draws partly on links to your business and on reviews. Google also states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and its advice is plain: verify the business, keep information accurate and complete, keep hours current, pick the right category, gather and answer reviews, and add photos.^[11]

In a metro area made of many neighborhoods and suburbs, distance has a plain consequence: the same business can show for a searcher in one suburb and not for another, depending on where each searcher is.^[11]

• Name: use your real-world business name as it appears on your storefront, website and stationery. Marketing taglines, hours, phone numbers and website addresses do not belong in it, and unnecessary information can lead to suspension of the profile.
• Address: use a precise, real location. Remote mailboxes are not acceptable, and a rented mailing address where the business does not operate (a virtual office) is not eligible. A co-working office qualifies only with clear signage, customers served there during business hours and your own staff.
• Service-area businesses: one profile for the central office with a designated service area. If you work from a home address, hide it. Google says the service area should not extend farther than about two hours of driving time from where you are based, though larger areas can be appropriate for some businesses.
• Categories: the fewest that describe your core business, not a list of keywords.
• One profile per location: duplicates can cause problems with how information shows in Maps and Search.^[10]

Google's generative AI guide says Business Profile and Merchant Center details can help local products and services be visible in AI responses as well as other Search results. LocalBusiness structured data on your own site needs a name and an address, and recommended fields include opening hours, telephone, URL and geo coordinates. Google does not promise that features that use structured data will appear.^[3],[6]

Reviews feed prominence, and they come with rules. Google's Maps policy removes reviews that were paid for, in cash or in kind, bars merchants from offering payment, discounts, free goods or services for a review, and bars selectively asking only happy customers or discouraging negative reviews. In August 2024 the FTC announced a final rule (16 CFR Part 465) that prohibits fake and AI-generated reviews, buying reviews conditioned on a positive or negative sentiment, undisclosed insider reviews and review suppression through groundless legal threats. The process that stays inside both: ask every customer the same way, offer nothing for the review, reply to every review, and never write one about your own business.^{[12],[23],[11]}

Polish-language search deserves its own pages, not a swapped word list. Google says to use a separate URL for each language version and to link the versions with hreflang. It treats localized versions as duplicates only when the main content stays untranslated, and it says it does not use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect the language of a page. A Polish page therefore has to actually be written in Polish.^[14]

We support clients in English and Polish from Mount Prospect, remotely across the United States and on site in the Chicago area. Our specialist sister site ai-seo-geo.com covers AI search optimization in depth, including entity work and AI citation tracking. This page covers the foundation and how it connects to local search.

Bing, Copilot, sitemaps and IndexNow

Bing's Webmaster Guidelines say Bing and Copilot search rely on the same core crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as traditional search, so SEO practice that helps discovery and clarity also helps eligibility for AI-generated answers and citations. For discovery Bing names four routes: IndexNow submission, XML sitemaps, crawlable internal links and external links from relevant sites. Sitemaps should list only canonical URLs, drop deleted or redirected URLs promptly and carry accurate last-modified dates, and Bing says sitemaps do not promise visibility.^[17]

IndexNow is a protocol for telling participating search engines that a URL was added, updated or deleted. A successful response only means the engine received the URL. One post can carry up to 10,000 URLs, and ownership is proved by hosting a key file on the site. Its FAQ lists Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep as endpoints, says a submission to one is shared across the IndexNow-enabled engines, and says submitting a URL does not promise immediate indexing. It recommends using IndexNow together with sitemaps and not resubmitting the same URL many times a day without a meaningful change. The IndexNow pages we read do not mention Google.^[19],[20]

For Google, the starter guide points to links from other pages and, optionally, a sitemap, and to Search Console for monitoring and URL inspection. It says a sitemap is not required.^[1],[2]

On our own deploys we submit the sitemap and send changed URLs through IndexNow after every publish, and we monitor Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.

What is measurable, and what is not

AI answers are not a fixed list. Google says AI Mode and AI Overviews may use different models and techniques, so the responses and links they show will vary, and that AI Overviews are only shown when its systems judge them additive to classic Search, so they often do not trigger. Bing says content may surface without a traditional click, and that a decline in clicks does not always mean lost visibility. Bing's announcement of its AI report calls it an early step toward GEO tooling in Bing Webmaster Tools.^{[2],[17],[18]}

Sources: ^{[2],[13],[17],[18],[21],[22],[3]}

Google reports that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews tend to be higher quality, meaning people are more likely to spend time on the site. Treat that as Google's own observation, not a measurement of your site; your analytics will show your own visitors.^[2]

We report from Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, the first-party sources above. For AI answers outside those reports, we agree a fixed list of customer questions with you and check them by hand on a schedule, recording the date, the assistant and what it showed. We treat the result as a sample, not a score, because the answers vary.

What we fix first, what we ignore and what we will not promise

Google's advice on hiring an SEO is a useful test for any proposal, ours included. It says an SEO should give realistic estimates of improvement and of the work involved, that no one can promise the top ranking, and that you should find someone else if an SEO says changes will give you first place. It warns about claims of a special relationship with Google or a priority submit, suggests asking what results to expect and in what timeframe, and asks whether the SEO will share every change made to your site. During an audit, it advises granting only read access to Search Console.^[9]

• We do not promise a ranking position, a mention in any AI answer, a traffic number or a date for first place. Google says indexing and serving are not assured even when requirements are met, and Bing says GEO does not promise citations.^[2],[17]
• We do not buy or swap links for ranking. Google's link spam policy lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes, and Bing lists link schemes among practices that reduce visibility.^[7],[17]
• We do not manufacture mentions or content in bulk. Google says seeking inauthentic mentions across the web is not as helpful as it might seem, and its scaled content abuse policy covers many pages produced without adding value.^[3],[7]
• We do not try to manipulate AI systems. Bing lists attempts to add content designed to interfere with the language models it uses among practices that may reduce visibility or lead to removal.^[17]
• We do not create or buy reviews or offer incentives for them, for the reasons in the local section above.^[12],[23]

Your search properties, domain and Business Profile stay in accounts you own. We ask for read access first, as Google suggests for an audit.^[9]

How an engagement works with us, what you receive and what to prepare

1. Request

   You describe the business, the services and areas you want to be found for, and what worries you.

2. Short call

   We ask about your goals, your site and your tools, and tell you honestly whether SEO is the right tool or whether something else, such as a new site or paid ads, would serve you better.

3. Written scope

   Goal, tools, approvals and the success measure, written down before anything is built or changed.

4. Read-only audit

   We review crawling, indexing, content, structured data, your Business Profile and Bing, and sort every finding into fix now, fix later or ignore, with the document that supports it.

5. Fix, publish and submit

   Pilots come before rollout: we start with a section of the site or a short list of pages. AI helps us draft, test and audit faster, and a person approves what goes live. Changed URLs go out through the sitemap and IndexNow.

6. Monitor and report

   We report from Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, say what the data cannot show, and agree the next round with you.

Who you work with: Media Express LLC, based in Mount Prospect, Illinois, has worked in digital since April 1, 1995, with 2,500+ digital projects delivered and 100+ web properties kept running and monitored by our own team of AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and open-source runtimes). Google's own story page says Google Inc. was officially born in August 1998, so we were building websites in the dial-up era, more than three years earlier. We support clients in English and Polish, remotely across the United States and on site in the Chicago area. Phone 773-800-1520, Monday to Friday 9-5 and Saturday 10-2 Central. We do not publish prices on the site: the estimate is free, we work with every budget, and scope and cost come in writing after a short call.^[27]

• A written audit with every finding sorted into fix now, fix later or ignore, and the Google or Bing document behind each one.
• Corrected technical items: robots.txt, sitemap, canonical URLs, redirects, titles and descriptions.
• Accurate structured data and, where it fits, an llms.txt file.
• A Business Profile review against Google's guidelines and a review-request process that follows the rules.
• Bilingual English and Polish page structure where your audience needs it.
• A regular report from Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, with the limits of each number stated.

To prepare: read-only access to Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, or the details we need to help you create properties you own; manager access to your Business Profile if you have one; a list of the services you want to be found for and the areas you serve; the questions customers really ask; and the person who approves what is published. If the problem is the site itself, start with web design or our CMS MESH page. Paid placements are covered on our advertising agency page and email, social and content channels on our marketing agency page.

When this is not a good fit

• You need a result by a date or at a named position. No honest SEO can promise one, and Google advises finding someone else if an SEO does.^[9]
• You have little to say that others have not said. Google puts unique, first-hand, useful content ahead of every other suggestion. SEO cannot supply the substance.^[3]
• You want reviews, mentions or links created for you. We will not, for the reasons given above.^{[12],[23],[7]}
• Your business does not qualify for a Business Profile, for example a rented mailing address or virtual office where no one works. Local SEO then rests on the website alone.^[10]
• You need traffic this week. That is paid media, covered on our advertising agency page. SEO works over weeks to months.
• You only have a one-off technical problem, such as a noindex tag left on after a redesign. A fix and a re-check may be all you need, not an ongoing engagement. We will say so on the first call.

Questions answered

Sources

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Google's definition of SEO, no secret that ranks a site first, how long changes take, optional sitemap, duplicate content, titles and descriptions, E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
2. AI features and your website (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. No extra requirements or special optimization for AI Overviews and AI Mode, eligibility (indexed, snippet), no AI text files or special schema, Search Console reporting, controls, variability of responses.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
3. Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Google's wording on AEO and GEO, still SEO, query fan-out, non-commodity content, local details, what you can ignore (llms.txt, chunking, rewriting, inauthentic mentions), third-party tools.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
4. Latest Google Search Documentation Updates (changelog) (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Dates: new generative AI guide (May 15, 2026), spam policies apply to generative AI responses, FAQ rich result ending May 7, 2026 and documentation removed, llms.txt clarification (June 15, 2026).https://developers.google.com/search/updates
5. Introduction to structured data markup in Google Search (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. What structured data is, JSON-LD recommendation, schema.org vocabulary, no promise of rich results, use for understanding entities.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/intro-structured-data
6. Local business structured data (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Required and recommended LocalBusiness properties, no promise that structured-data features will appear.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/local-business
7. Spam policies for Google web search (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Scaled content abuse, doorway abuse (city-targeted pages), keyword stuffing (lists of cities), link spam, consequences.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies
8. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Who, how and why framework, disclosure of automation or AI, E-E-A-T is not a specific ranking factor, trust most important.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
9. Do you need an SEO? (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Realistic estimates, no one can promise the top ranking, special relationship and priority submit warnings, questions to ask, read access to Search Console.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/do-i-need-seo
10. Guidelines for representing your business on Google (Google Business Profile Help), accessed 2026-10-13. Business name, address, virtual office, co-working, service-area businesses, hiding the address, categories, one profile per location.https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177
11. Tips to improve your local ranking on Google (Google Business Profile Help), accessed 2026-10-13. Relevance, distance and prominence, no way to pay for a better local ranking, reviews, links, advice on improving the profile.https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091
12. Prohibited and restricted content (Maps user generated content policy) (Google Maps User Generated Content Policy Help), accessed 2026-10-13. Paid and incentivized reviews, selective solicitation, removal and account actions.https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114
13. Generative AI performance report (Search) (Search Console Help), accessed 2026-10-13. What the report shows (impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device, date), rollout to all websites worldwide as of August 31, 2026, exclusion note.https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16984139
14. Managing multi-regional and multilingual sites (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Separate URLs per language, hreflang, duplicates only when untranslated, language detection.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions
15. Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. The three metrics and their stated targets, recommendation to achieve good scores.https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/core-web-vitals
16. Google's common crawlers (Google Search Central), accessed 2026-10-13. Googlebot scope and the Google-Extended robots.txt token (Gemini training and grounding, no effect on Search inclusion).https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
17. Bing Webmaster Guidelines (Microsoft Bing), accessed 2026-10-13. Bing's own use of SEO and GEO, same foundation for Copilot, discovery routes, sitemaps, IndexNow, redirects, robots and meta directives, structured data, content, abuse list.https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a
18. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview (Microsoft Bing Webmaster Blog), accessed 2026-10-13. What the report counts (citations, average cited pages, grounding queries, page-level), surfaces covered, stated limits.https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2026/2/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview/
19. IndexNow documentation (IndexNow.org), accessed 2026-10-13. What a successful response means, up to 10,000 URLs per post, key file ownership verification.https://www.indexnow.org/documentation
20. IndexNow FAQ (IndexNow.org), accessed 2026-10-13. Participating endpoints, sharing across engines, no promise of immediate indexing, use with sitemaps, resubmission guidance.https://www.indexnow.org/faq
21. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers (OpenAI), accessed 2026-10-13. OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot purposes, independent settings, effect of opting out of OAI-SearchBot, about 24 hours for robots.txt changes.https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
22. Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler? (Anthropic Claude Help Center), accessed 2026-10-13. The three Anthropic crawlers and their purposes, separate robots.txt rules per crawler and per subdomain.https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler
23. Federal Trade Commission Announces Final Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials (U.S. Federal Trade Commission), accessed 2026-10-13. What the final rule (16 CFR Part 465) prohibits: fake and AI-generated reviews, buying reviews by sentiment, insider reviews, review suppression.https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/08/federal-trade-commission-announces-final-rule-banning-fake-reviews-testimonials
24. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv 2311.09735) (arXiv (Aggarwal et al.)), accessed 2026-10-13. Origin of the term GEO in a 2023 paper accepted to KDD 2024, the authors' own reported visibility gain and its domain dependence.https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
25. Getting started with schema.org using Microdata (Schema.org), accessed 2026-10-13. What schema.org is: shared vocabularies for marking up pages, understood by the major search engines.https://schema.org/docs/gs.html
26. The /llms.txt file (proposal) (llmstxt.org (Jeremy Howard)), accessed 2026-10-13. llms.txt is a proposal published September 2024: a Markdown file at a site root; no commitment to use it is stated on the page.https://llmstxt.org/
27. Our story (Google), accessed 2026-10-13. Google Inc. was officially born in August 1998, used for the history comparison.https://about.google/company-info/our-story/

How we checked this page

Last verified 2026-10-13 · Media Express LLC

General information, not legal, financial or security advice. Rules and vendor terms change; check the cited source before you rely on a figure.

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