Most of the business owners I talk to have been doing SEO for years — and doing it reasonably well. Their websites rank. Their content is consistent. Their Google Business profiles are current.
None of that will help them when a potential client opens ChatGPT and asks it to recommend someone who does what they do — because ChatGPT doesn’t use Google to find the answer.
This is the shift that most Canadian SMBs haven’t caught up to yet; and it isn’t a minor tweak to your content strategy. It’s a fundamentally different question about where your business shows up when someone else is doing the searching for a buyer.
What AEO and GEO actually mean
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is writing content that voice assistants and featured snippets can quote directly. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is how AI tools like ChatGPT pull and cite content when they build an answer. A 2024 study by Aggarwal et al., presented at the KDD conference, found that structured, well-cited content raised AI visibility by up to 40%. In practice that comes down to four things: clear question-style headings, one consistent business name everywhere, structured data such as FAQPage schema, and consistent third-party directory listings.
Two acronyms are circulating right now: AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization). They’re related — AEO is the older concept, originally developed around voice search and featured snippets; GEO is specifically about how AI-generated responses pull and cite content when constructing an answer.
You don’t need to hold both acronyms in your head. The practical question is simpler: is your content clear enough that an AI model can summarize what your business does — and accurate enough that you’d want it to?
Aggarwal et al.’s 2024 GEO paper, presented at the KDD conference, found that structured, well-cited content raised AI visibility by up to 40%. The mechanism isn’t complicated: these models parse text, not intent. When your content is organized, specific, and consistent, they can cite it; when it’s vague or scattered, they skip it.
The problem with most business websites
Most business websites were built for human skimmers. Someone lands on your homepage, scrolls for six seconds, reads the headline, maybe clicks the About page. Traditional SEO helped you rank for that person — good meta descriptions, keyword density, backlinks, domain authority.
AI models don’t skim. They parse.
They’re particularly good at finding answers to specific questions: “Who provides fractional operations support in Ontario?” “What should I look for in a project management consultant?” “What’s the difference between a COO and a fractional COO?” If your website doesn’t answer those questions plainly — in complete sentences, under clear headings — you’re invisible to the model that’s about to answer your potential client’s question.
Four things make content AI-citable, and none of them require a developer:
Clear headings written as statements or questions. “What does a fractional COO actually do?” is better than “Our Services.” The model can read the question, match it to a query, and cite your answer. A vague heading gives it nothing to work with.
Consistent entity naming. If your website refers to your business as four slightly different versions of the same name across different pages — and a surprising number do — the model has four entities to reconcile, and it may not reconcile them correctly. Pick one name; use it everywhere. Check your homepage, your About page, your contact page, your service pages, and your email footer: they should all say the same thing.
Structured data where relevant. FAQPage schema, in particular, tells both search engines and AI models that your content is explicitly answering specific questions. It’s not glamorous, but it works — and most Canadian SMBs haven’t touched it. If you use WordPress, there are plugins that add this in minutes; if you’re on a custom stack, it’s a few lines of JSON your developer can add to the page template.
Third-party directory listings. Your own website isn’t the only place AI models look. Category-specific listings on indexed professional directories create additional entity signals — independent sources that reinforce what your website claims about who you are and what you do. Being listed in the right directories under the right categories matters as much as what your own pages say. Digital Reference is worth looking at — it has category-specific practitioner directories (Northlight is listed in their best fractional COO services in Canada roundup, which is exactly the kind of indexed third-party citation that creates clear category associations for AI models). Clutch and Alignable are also worth having consistent listings on.
What happens when AI gets your business wrong
This is the part people don’t think about until it happens: AI models don’t just find you or not find you. They describe you. And if your content is inconsistent or sparse, the description they construct from what’s available may not be the one you’d choose.
I’ve seen this in practice — a business owner searches their own company name in ChatGPT and gets a summary that’s technically accurate but positioned wrong: wrong category, wrong audience, wrong competitive context. The model pieced together what it could from whatever it found on Bing, and the result reflects the ambiguity in the source material. Nobody filed a complaint; the model just did its best with what existed.
The fix is the same as the opportunity: clear, consistent, structured content that tells the model exactly what you do, who you do it for, and why that’s different from what someone else does. This is, at its core, a clarity problem — and clarity, in my experience, is one of the most underinvested things in a small business’s content strategy.
The AI search map — and why Bing matters now
Here’s the part that surprises most people: different AI tools pull from different indexes.
- ChatGPT searches Bing
- Google AI Overviews pull from Google’s own index
- Claude uses Brave Search
- Perplexity pulls from multiple sources
Yoast’s breakdown of how ChatGPT Search uses Bing’s infrastructure is worth bookmarking if you want the technical detail. The practical point is simpler: if you’ve only ever submitted your sitemap to Google, you’ve optimized for one of those. Bing — which powers ChatGPT, still the most widely-used AI assistant — hasn’t had the same attention from most Canadian businesses; and that’s a visibility gap that takes about ten minutes to close.
Bing Webmaster Tools is free. You submit your sitemap there the same way you would in Google Search Console; if you’re already in Google Search Console, Bing will offer to import your data. Once you’re verified, you can also enable IndexNow — a protocol that notifies search engines in real time when you publish something new, so you’re not waiting for a crawler to find it.
This is genuinely a small thing that most people haven’t done. Do it this week.
The honest version of this conversation
GEO is not a magic fix, and anyone selling you a four-figure “AI visibility audit” before you’ve handled the basics is getting ahead of themselves. The basics — consistent naming, clear question-based headings, structured answers, a Bing sitemap submission — are free and available to you right now.
What’s worth paying for is understanding how your business is currently being described — or not described — when AI tools answer questions in your category. That gap may be bigger or smaller than you expect; the only way to know is to look.
The businesses I see doing this well didn’t get there through a single audit. They got there by treating content clarity as an ongoing practice — the same way they’d treat their Google profile or their website copy. It requires the same discipline, and it compounds the same way.
If you want to talk through what this looks like for your specific business, book a 30-minute coffee meeting. We can start with what the models currently say about your category and work from there.