TAGGLEFISH SEO

Entities, AEO and GEO: Getting AI Search to Understand Your Business

Someone opens ChatGPT and types "who should I call for a burst pipe in Silver Spring." No search results page, no map pack, no ten blue links. One answer, maybe three names in it.

If you are not one of the three, nothing about your ranking saved you.

This is a different problem from ranking, and most SEO advice does not touch it. Your metadata plugin describes your pages. What answer engines need is a machine-readable account of your business: what it is, what it does, where it does it, and why it should be believed. This guide covers what that means, how to check whether you have it, and what to fix first.

Three terms, plainly

Entity. A thing a machine can identify and hold facts about. "Smith Plumbing LLC, a plumbing contractor at 123 Main Street, Silver Spring MD, phone 301-555-0100" is an entity. "Plumbing services in the DMV area" is a phrase. Google and every answer engine work with entities; text is just the raw material they extract them from. AEO, answer engine optimization. Being the source an answer engine quotes. Google AI Overviews, featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice results. Mostly won by clear question-and-answer content that is easy to lift. GEO, generative engine optimization. Being a business a generative model names when someone asks it for a recommendation. Won by having a consistent, corroborated entity that appears across enough of the web that the model has learned you exist.

They overlap heavily. AEO is about getting a passage quoted; GEO is about getting the business recommended. The work underneath both is the same: be legible and be consistent.

Why your SEO plugin does not do this

Yoast, Rank Math and AIOSEO are good at what they do. They write titles, descriptions, canonicals, a sitemap, and a base schema graph, and they grade your content while you write it.

What they do not do:

  • Tell you whether your services exist as structured entities, or only as prose
  • Check that your service areas are backed by real content
  • Verify that the business named in your schema matches your Google Business Profile, your citations and your social profiles
  • Score whether an answer engine could extract a clean, quotable answer from your page
  • Tell you if an AI assistant currently knows you exist

None of this is a criticism. A metadata plugin was never scoped to answer "does ChatGPT know who I am." That is a separate job, and it is the job Livable Geo does.

The entity checklist

Work down this in order. Each item is a thing an answer engine either can or cannot resolve about you.

1. One name, everywhere, character for character

Pick the name you actually trade under and use it identically on the website, the Google Business Profile, every citation and every social profile. Not "Smith Plumbing LLC" in one place and "Smith Plumbing" in another. Inconsistency does not just weaken the signal, it can cause an engine to model you as two different businesses, each with half the evidence.

2. A named business entity in your schema

Your schema graph should declare an Organization or a LocalBusiness with a name, and that name should be the one from step 1. Without this, an engine has to infer your identity from body copy, which it will do badly.

Check your page source for application/ld+json and read what is actually in it. Most sites have a graph. Fewer have a graph that names the business.

3. sameAs links

sameAs is how you tell a machine "these profiles are all the same entity as this website." Your Google Business Profile or Maps URL, your Facebook page, your primary directory listings. This is the single highest-leverage piece of entity markup most contractor sites are missing, and it takes ten minutes.

Without it, an engine has to guess that the Smith Plumbing on Yelp is the Smith Plumbing on your site. Usually it guesses right. "Usually" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

4. Services as things, not sentences

"We do drain cleaning, water heater installation and repiping" is a sentence. An engine can extract entities from it, imperfectly. Modelling those services as structured data makes them unambiguous.

The test: could a machine list your services without parsing prose? If the only place your services exist is a paragraph, the answer is no.

5. Locations backed by content

If your profile claims twelve service areas and your site has one page listing them, you have twelve claims and one piece of evidence. Cut the claims or build the evidence.

Real location pages mean local specifics: projects done there, areas covered, things true of working in that place. Not the same page with the city name swapped. That approach has been degrading for years and now carries more risk than upside.

6. Proof a machine can read

Reviews, licence numbers, years in business, insurance, guarantees. These are what an engine leans on when deciding whether to recommend you rather than merely mention you. Review and rating schema makes them machine-readable rather than decorative.

7. Answerable content

For AEO specifically: headings phrased as the questions customers actually ask, each followed by a tight 40 to 60 word answer. That format is what gets lifted into an AI Overview. A page structured as a wall of prose has nothing extractable in it, however good the prose is.

FAQ schema on top of that content makes the extraction unambiguous.

How to check where you stand

Free, right now, no tooling:

  1. View source and search for application/ld+json. Count the blocks. Read one. Does it name your business? Does it have sameAs?
  2. Ask an AI directly. Open ChatGPT or Perplexity and ask "who are the best [your trade] in [your city]." Then ask "tell me about [your business name]." What comes back, and is it right?
  3. Compare your profile to your site. Open your Google Business Profile next to your homepage. Name, address, phone, categories, service areas. Any mismatch is a mismatch an engine can see too.

That third one finds a problem on almost every site we look at.

Where Livable Geo fits

The checklist above is work you can do by hand. What is hard by hand is knowing where you currently stand, across every page, and whether the work moved anything.

Livable Geo indexes your pages, posts, services, locations, FAQs and testimonials into an AI-readable knowledge graph, then measures against it:

  • Per-page scores, 1 to 100, across ten weighted dimensions: entity coverage, service clarity, location relevance, FAQ coverage, answer completeness, schema coverage, internal linking, trust signals, review usage and AI answer readiness. That list maps almost item for item onto the checklist above.
  • Per-engine visibility, scored separately for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, because they do not agree with each other and one of them speaking well of you is not the same as all four.
  • A fix queue, where every gap is an action carrying an impact, a reason and a difficulty, rather than a report you read once.

One thing to know before you buy: Geo needs your own OpenAI API key to build the index, and probing the live models on the visibility screen spends against that key. You pay the provider directly, at provider cost. Nothing is resold to you.

It works alongside your metadata plugin, not instead of it. Yoast keeps owning the base graph; Geo tells you whether that graph is doing you any good.

The order to do this in

If you do one thing: sameAs links. Ten minutes, and it is the clearest statement of identity you can make.

If you do three things: sameAs, then name consistency across profile and citations, then question-shaped content with FAQ schema on your top service page.

If you are doing all of it, the order is: identity first (name, schema entity, sameAs), then evidence (locations backed by content, proof signals), then extraction (question headings, FAQ schema). Identity without evidence is a claim. Evidence without identity cannot be attributed to you.

FAQ

Is this different from normal SEO? It overlaps but it is not the same. Ranking is about pages competing for a query. This is about a machine resolving your business as a known thing it can describe and recommend. A site can rank well and still be invisible to an AI assistant. Do I need to do this if I already rank well? Ranking well means the current system works for you. The question is what happens as more searches get answered without a results page at all. The work here is cheap and it does not cost you anything on classic search. Will AI search replace Google? Nobody credible knows. What is already true is that a growing share of "who should I hire" questions get answered by an assistant, and being absent from those answers costs you the same as being absent from the map pack. How long does this take to show up? Schema and consistency fixes get picked up in weeks. Entity corroboration, appearing consistently enough across the web that a model has learned you, compounds over months. Anyone promising faster is guessing.

Next step

Get Livable Visibility and see where your entity actually stands.

Already running Yoast? Read how Livable SEO works alongside it so nothing gets output twice.