SEO, AEO and GEO: What Actually Changed, and What to Do About It

Three acronyms are being sold as three separate services. They are not three separate services, and understanding the overlap is what stops you paying three times for the same underlying work.

What each one actually means

The 70% that is the same work

All three depend on the same foundation, and most businesses have not finished it:

• Content that can be crawled without executing JavaScript.
• A logical heading structure that reflects the actual argument of the page.
• Facts about the business stated identically everywhere they appear.
• Genuine expertise, with an identifiable author and a review date.
• Fast, accessible pages — a page that fails on a mid-range Android phone fails for everyone.
• Internal links that describe where they go.

If any of those is missing, no amount of GEO tactics will help. The newer disciplines are multipliers on the foundation, not substitutes for it.

AEO in practice

Answer engines extract passages. To be extractable, a passage has to make sense when lifted out of the page and shown on its own.

1. 01Write the heading as the question a person would actually type or say.
2. 02Answer it in the first two or three sentences, completely, before any context.
3. 03Then explain, qualify and expand.
4. 04Use tables for genuine comparisons — they are extracted often and read well.
5. 05Mark up FAQs only where the questions and answers are visible on the page.

GEO in practice

Generative systems answer from a synthesis of sources and cite a handful. What raises the odds of being one of them:

• Entity consistency — legal name, address, founding date and service descriptions identical across your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory.
• Original information: primary data, real pricing, sector specifics that are not reproduced on fifty other sites.
• Explicit relationships between your services, industries, people and work, so a machine can reconstruct what you do and for whom.
• Clear, dated authorship and review.
• Citable primary sources, linked.
• Optionally an llms.txt file summarising the site — useful, but not a substitute for being crawlable normally.

Be sceptical of anyone selling guaranteed AI citations. These systems are opaque, they change frequently, and no vendor controls their retrieval. What is buildable is the underlying credibility; the citation is the output, not the lever.

What is specific to Nepal

• Search volumes are small, so keyword tools frequently report zero for terms that convert well. Do not let a volume number veto an obviously commercial term.
• Bilingual search behaviour is common — the same person searches in English and in romanised Nepali depending on the query.
• Local pack visibility is disproportionately valuable in Kathmandu, and a verified, complete Google Business Profile does more for many businesses than months of content.
• Very little authoritative Nepali-market content exists in most categories, which makes original writing unusually effective here compared with a saturated market.

A sensible order of work

1. 01Fix crawlability, speed and site structure. Nothing else compounds until this is done.
2. 02Make your business facts consistent everywhere, and verify the Google Business Profile.
3. 03Publish genuinely useful content on the questions your customers actually ask, structured answer-first.
4. 04Add valid structured data for what is visible on the page.
5. 05Build internal links so related pages reinforce each other.
6. 06Then measure: Search Console for search, referral traffic and brand mentions for AI surfaces.