Get your brand into the answer that AI systems generate. (Image: MO Agency)
For 20 years, getting found online meant ranking on Google. You optimised a page, you climbed the results and buyers clicked a blue link. That game is being replaced by a different one. Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google’s AI Overviews a direct question, and the assistant answers with a short, synthesised recommendation that names a handful of brands. If yours is not one of them, you are not on page two. You are simply absent.
The behaviour has already shifted. Forrester’s 2025 B2B Buyer Study found that 89% of B2B buyers now consult an AI assistant during vendor research, and that 41% say an AI recommendation directly shaped their final shortlist. Gartner expects that by 2027, more than half of all B2B vendor evaluations will start with an AI assistant rather than a search engine. The discipline that wins this new surface has two names, AEO and GEO, and they are quickly becoming as important as SEO ever was.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the practice of structuring your content, data and authority signals so that AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini cite and recommend your brand when someone asks a category-level question. Where SEO optimises for a position in a list of results, AEO optimises for inclusion in the single answer the model generates.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the closely related practice of optimising specifically for generative engines, the large language models that build an answer from many sources rather than returning a page of links. GEO is the more technical term; it focuses on how those models retrieve, synthesise and attribute information when they construct a response.
Almost. There is a technical distinction (AEO covers direct-answer surfaces broadly, GEO narrows to generative engines), but in practice the two overlap so heavily that most agencies, including MO Agency, treat them as a single discipline: getting your brand into the answer that AI systems generate. Simply put, AEO is the broad practice of shaping your content and signals so AI answers favour you, and GEO is the slice of that work aimed specifically at generative engines like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
How is this different from SEO?
Traditional SEO ranks pages. AEO and GEO optimise entities and structured, machine-readable content so a model can retrieve and trust it. The deeper difference is the shape of the result. SEO competes for the first page of search engine results; AI search is largely binary. Your brand is either part of the answer or not, and there is no second page to turn to. That said, if multiple brands are mentioned in an AI answer, the user will tend to give more weight to the brands mentioned first.
Why South African brands are already behind
Three things are putting local businesses on the back foot.
The buyers moved, the websites did not. In South Africa, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini have become default tools for procurement, sales and marketing teams’ qualifying suppliers. AEO went from a niche idea to a necessity for local marketing teams over the past year. Yet, most South African B2B brands have not caught up. Websites, and the metrics used to measure them, are still built entirely around Google.
Standard analytics hide the problem. Website analytics show you human visitors, not AI crawlers, so most brands cannot even see whether AI systems are reading their site, let alone recommending it. There is a tell, though. Across the clients we work with, organic search traffic has been declining while direct traffic climbs at almost the same rate. A lot of that direct traffic is likely people who discovered a brand inside an AI assistant and then typed the name into a browser. The analytics record it only as direct, so the AI-driven discovery that produced it stays invisible. Most teams are flying blind.
AI answers are winner-take-few. The assistant names two or three providers, not a page of options, and models tend to reinforce the brands they already cite. That means early movers compound their lead while everyone else gets harder to dislodge. On top of this, most of the tooling and expertise for AI visibility was built for the US market and has been neither tailored to nor readily available locally, which is part of why South African brands are starting from behind.
Competing means doing genuinely different work from classic SEO. You make your content readable to AI crawlers through clean markdown, llms.txt and structured metadata. You keep your brand entity consistent across the sources models trust, from schema markup to third-party citations. You build real authority. And above all, you measure AI visibility rather than guess at it, because you cannot improve what you cannot see, and standard analytics will not show it to you.
This is the gap MO Agency built Getmd.ai to close: a South African-built platform that makes sites AI-readable, tracks AI bots and tracks how a brand is mentioned, cited and recommended across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. The agency built it because there was no AI visibility solution tailored to or readily available for the South African market. If you want a free starting point, MO Agency’s AI Visibility Audit will show you how your brand currently appears in AI answers.
SEO is not dead, but it is no longer the whole game. The brands that treat AEO and GEO as a distinct discipline now, while the field is still young, will be the ones AI assistants recommend by name a year from now. The rest will be the brands nobody can see.
