Generative Search is Still SEO. AEO + GEO Are Tactics to Sell You.

We've been getting some form of the same question a lot lately, "Do you optimize for AEO and GEO?" “You also do the whole AEO and GEO thing, right” “You know all the answer engine stuff?”

It's a totally fair question to ask. After all, the acronyms are everywhere right now, and the people using them sound pretty confident.

But more often than not, when we dig in a little, it turns out the advisor isn't totally sure what AEO or GEO are; and, nearly just as often, they’re not totally sure what SEO is either.

Which, as it happens, is also totally fair. We don’t blame you. There's a lot flying around at the moment.

So, let's take the time to clear it up, starting with the most authoritative source we could possibly use—you guessed it—Google.

In June 2026, Google published an official guide on optimizing for generative AI features in Search. They addressed AEO and GEO directly, by name. Here's what they said, literally word for word:

"From Google Search's perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

That's the whole thesis of this article baked into a single sentence, straight from the largest search platform on earth. Generative search is still SEO.

AEO and GEO are, for the most part, just new names for things you should already be doing—and in some cases, names attached to tactics that don't work at all.

Let me walk you through it.

Advisors Confused About What AEO and GEO Are

The fact is you’re likely confused about these terms because the whole business model is based on selling you new, “absolutely-mandatory-or-you-won’t-survive-in-the-new-era-of-search” features.

Get my stance on it? 

It’s ridiculous. It’s a ploy to sell you through fear mongering. A lot of it is untrue.

When a concept is genuinely hard to understand, it's changing fast, and it sounds all technical and futuristic, it becomes very easy to sell. You can charge a premium for an "AEO package" or a "GEO strategy" precisely because the person buying it can't easily tell whether it's real, repackaged, or nonsense. 

Most advisors are far too busy running their own practice to keep up with every shift in search. Which isn’t a knock on you, it’s just the reality.

This blog isn't here to tell you AEO and GEO are complete scams—they're not.

But, it is here to give you enough understanding that nobody can sell you fog.

Let's build that understanding from the ground up.

SEO, AEO, and GEO, What Do They Mean For Advisors?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice of making your advisory website easier for search engines to find, understand, and rank—so the right people end up landing on it when they search for what you offer.

It's the foundation everything else sits on, and it's made up of a lot of moving parts: keywords, meta titles and descriptions, header structure, internal and external links, backlinks, page speed, mobile experience, E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) and various other factors.

If any of those terms are fuzzy, we wrote a full plain-English breakdown of them in SEO Simplified: Blog Tips for Financial Advisors. It's probably worth a read before going further, because almost everything in the AEO/GEO conversation traces back to these fundamentals. We'll keep coming back to SEO basics across our blogs, because they genuinely are the thing to focus on.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

AEO is the practice of structuring your content so it gets pulled into direct answers—things like featured snippets, "People Also Ask" boxes, voice search results, and AI-generated summaries.

When someone asks a question, the engine grabs your content as the answer, rather than just listing your page as one of ten blue links.

It originally grew up around Google's featured snippets and knowledge panels, and has since stretched to cover AI answer tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

GEO is the much broader umbrella: managing your whole online presence so you show up well inside answers generated by large language models (LLMs)—the tech behind tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot.

It includes both on-site content and off-site signals like third-party mentions, reviews, and where your name shows up across the web. AEO is essentially a piece of GEO, focused on the content-structure layer.

So the whole relationship looks like this: SEO is the foundation. AEO is a strategy for winning direct answers. GEO is the wider umbrella for AI visibility.

As you'll see, the tactics inside AEO and GEO overlap heavily with the foundations: solid SEO.

The Marketing Tactics Being Sold to Financial Advisors

At this point, you’re probably wondering what the tactics being sold to financial advisors, like yourself, are. Well, some are recycled SEO fundamentals, others are based on incomplete or outdated information. All of them are pitched as a “get rich fast” without explicitly stating the words “get rich fast.”

"Schema markup for LLMs"

Schema markup is structured data added to your site's code that helps search engines understand what your content is about. Structured-what? Think of it as little labels you attach to the information on a page—"this is a review," "this is the star rating," "this is the author"—written in a code format every search engine recognises. 

It's a legitimate, long-standing part of SEO. No argument there. Actually, it’s 15 years old.

The problem is when it's sold as a special, AI-specific lever that unlocks hidden visibility in generative results. On that, Google is pretty blunt:

"Structured data isn't required for generative AI search, and there's no special schema.org markup you need to add."

Google still recommends using structured data as part of your overall SEO strategy, because it helps you qualify for rich results. But, there's no secret "LLM schema."

It's the same structured data we’ve used for years.

"LLMS.txt files"

This is the one that comes up constantly: the pitch that adding a special .txt file to "talk to the AI crawlers" will boost your standing in LLMs. Here's Google, directly:

"You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search (including its generative AI capabilities), as Google Search itself doesn't use them."

In case there's any doubt about whether it at least helps:

"Doing so won't harm (nor help) your visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them."

So, if someone's charging you to set up an llms.txt file for Google visibility, you now know exactly what Google thinks of it. (Other platforms may use these files—but that's a different conversation, and not what most of these pitches imply.)

"Testimonials and reviews"

Reviews matter—like, a lot—for trust, for local SEO, and for the credibility signals that help you across the board. We say so plainly in our SEO guide: Google uses reviews as a key ranking factor tied to E-E-A-T.

So, this is genuinely real.

It’s important to note, though, that this isn’t something new. It's foundational SEO and reputation-building, and it has been for over a decade.

Calling it "GEO" doesn't suddenly make it new.

".txt and FAQ pages"

FAQ content has been pushed hard as an AEO play.

“Throw together an FAQ page with a boatload of FAQ’s and you’ll be on your merry way.”

That’s just not how it works. While truly helpful FAQ content is good for your visitors and can support your visibility, it’s not the key to AEO or GEO success.

We're big believers in answering real client questions; we even wrote a whole post on the 15 FAQs every advisor site needs. If you haven’t read that blog, it’s a good one.

But the FAQ-schema-for-rich-results tactic has quietly expired.

Google deprecated FAQ rich results from standard Search back in 2023, reserving them for a narrow set of authoritative government and health sites—and it removed FAQ rich-result support entirely as of 2026.

So, if part of the pitch is "FAQ schema will win you rich snippets," that ship has largely sailed (loving all the sea metaphors yet?). Write FAQs because they help your clients, not because you’re chasing a result. 

Be careful, too, because you may fall into the old “keyword stuffing” category.

"Chunking and rewriting content for AI"

Another common one: chop your content into bite-sized pieces, or rewrite it in a special "AI-friendly" way. Here’s Google's take:

"There's no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it."

Their guidance is to write for your audience, at whatever length serves the topic—not to contort your pages for a machine.

What Google Says About Marketers Selling You

Google didn't stop at just the optimization guide. They targeted the ones trying to sell you, publishing official guidance on third-party SEO tools and advice.

It speaks almost directly to the advisor getting pitched an AEO or GEO package. A few quotes worth keeping in your back pocket:

On the advice itself:

"While some advice is helpful, others may misinterpret or make claims about what 'Google says' or how Google ranking systems work."

On services claiming Google's blessing:

"Google doesn't evaluate third-party services, so be wary of such claims and those making them."

And, on the guarantees:

"using a service or tool doesn't guarantee ranking success."

The test they suggest is refreshingly simple, like a cold lemonade on a hot summer day.

Does the advice line up with official Google guidance, or not so much?

As they put it, good advice "either qualifies their claims as opinion based on data or experience, or backs up their claims by citing official Google Search guidance." If a vendor can't point you to either, that tells you something.

A fair caveat: Google's guidance is about Google. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and other tools work differently, and a handful of these tactics may carry more weight there. But for most advisors, Google is still where the overwhelming majority of search traffic comes from—so when Google tells you what does and doesn't work in its AI features, that's got to count more than the others.

What Does AEO and GEO Mean For You, as a Financial Advisor?

If we put it all together, what's the key takeaway? Well, you don’t need some expensive “AI Package.” What you do need is a solid SEO foundation and strategy that’ll help build up your domain authority and search presence.

Google's own one-line summary of its guide is to "prioritize effective SEO strategies over 'AEO/GEO hacks'."

You can do this by:

Writing content only you can write. AI summarisers and search engines both reward original, experience-led material over generic filler. Your real take on a retirement-planning decision, drawn from actual client work, is worth more than a recycled "5 tips" post any tool could spit out.

Keeping your technical house in order. Your pages have to be crawlable and indexable to show up anywhere in Google—AI features included. Clean structure, fast load times, solid mobile experience. (Our SEO guide covers the tools to check all of this.)

Owning your local and niche searches. A specific query like "fee-only fiduciary advisor for physicians in Calgary" will convert far better than a generic one, even with lower volume. A well-kept Google Business Profile and location-specific pages do real work here.

Being consistent, not flashy. No surprise here. The advisors building a strong foundation and actively feeding it will show up sooner than the ones chasing shiny new acronyms.

The Bottom Line

AEO and GEO aren't things to totally write off. They’re not just fake.

They point at a real shift we’re watching day-in and day-out as your prospects shift from non-specific search to hyper-specific searches.

They point at a real change in how people find information, and some of their tactics overlap with good SEO. But they're frequently sold as something brand new and separate—when Google itself says, plainly, that optimising for generative search is SEO.

So the next time you get the pitch, you've got the only question you really need: does this match what Google's own documentation actually says? If the answer's yes, great—it's probably just good SEO. If they can't show you, that's worth knowing too.

Build a site worth finding. Write content worth reading. Keep the technical foundation solid. That's what gets you found—in Google, in AI Overviews, and everywhere else that matters for your practice.

Aryze Design builds websites for financial advisors that are made to rank, convert, and earn their keep—on a foundation that actually holds up. If you want a straight, jargon-free conversation about what good SEO looks like for your firm, book a free assessment.