A new web standard called WebMCP is changing how AI agents interact with websites. Here's what it means for yours.
They are five names for two jobs. SEO, AEO, GEO and AIO all describe the same underlying work, making a page easy for a machine to find, understand and quote. SXO describes what happens after the click. Most businesses chasing all five have a click problem, not a visibility problem.
A graphic doing the rounds on LinkedIn stacks five layers of search work on top of each other, SEO, AEO, GEO, AIO and SXO, with about forty tasks underneath them. It's a useful map of the territory. It also makes the job look a lot more complicated than it is.
Four of the five describe the same underlying work in front of different audiences. Treat them as four separate projects and you pay for the same work four times. Below is what each acronym means, where they genuinely differ, and the one layer that gets left off almost every version of that chart, despite being close to half of the Google traffic arriving at our own site.
Five acronyms, in roughly the order they arrived.
One naming trap: AEO is also used for agent experience optimisation, which is about AI agents using your site rather than quoting it. We covered that in our piece on WebMCP.
Mostly no. They describe the same work, aimed at different surfaces.
Google says so plainly. Its guidance for site owners states there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisations necessary. The best practices for SEO still apply.
Whether you want a featured snippet, a mention in ChatGPT or a first-page ranking, the mechanics line up. Answer the question in the first 40 to 60 words of a section. Keep each section self-contained, so a machine can lift one part without needing the rest. Use headings that match what people actually type. Keep who you are, where you are and what you sell consistent across every profile that mentions you.
Do that once and all four acronyms are covered.
There is one genuine technical difference. The crawlers behind ChatGPT and Claude fetch JavaScript files but don't run them, so content or structured data assembled in the browser is invisible to them. Webflow serves finished HTML by default. On a custom build it is a decision someone has to make on purpose.
Being talked about somewhere other than your own website.
Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that mentions of a brand across the web correlated with visibility in Google's AI Overviews about three times more strongly than backlinks did. In a follow-up report across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity, YouTube mentions were the single strongest signal of AI visibility. Link volume barely registered.
The practical version: if you speak at industry events, run webinars or have recorded talks sitting on a hard drive, publishing them to YouTube is likely to do more for your AI visibility than most technical SEO work. It costs an afternoon and an upload.
The second lever is being quotable. An AI engine lifts a passage that answers a question cleanly. Long pages with headings like "Our Approach" give it nothing to take.
Yes, as a way of making your facts unambiguous to machines. Not as a shortcut.
Structured data tells a search engine, in a format it doesn't have to interpret, who wrote a page, what a business is, where it is and what it offers. That helps every engine that reads it. What it doesn't do is replace clear writing on the page itself.
Two types to skip on a commercial site. Google restricted FAQ rich results to well-known government and health websites in August 2023, so FAQ markup no longer earns anything in the results page. Keep the FAQ section for readers and AI engines and drop the markup claim. And review or rating markup on testimonials you host yourself is ignored. Client quotes work well as visible, attributed text.
One rule catches a surprising number of sites: markup has to describe content people can see on the page. We found a block of FAQ schema on one of our own service pages describing four questions that appeared nowhere on it. Inherited from an earlier build, and quietly working against us.
Because being seen and being chosen are different problems, and only one of them has five acronyms attached.
Here are our own numbers. Over twelve months our site took 475,000 impressions in Google and returned 1,630 clicks. That's a click-through rate of 0.3%. Part of that is ranking - a lot of those impressions sit on page two and three. But even on the pages that rank well, clicks weren't following.
What moves it is duller work. Headings phrased as the question someone typed. A direct answer instead of three paragraphs of warm-up. One page per search intent, instead of three pages splitting one query between them. A price on the page, because on a results page full of blog posts the priced result is the one that looks different.
If your reporting shows impressions climbing and enquiries flat, you don't have a GEO problem. You have a relevance and clarity problem wearing a traffic problem's clothes.
The map pack. For a local business it can be the biggest one.
We tagged our own Google Business Profile properly in September 2026 and did the arithmetic. Business Profile clicks sit inside the Search Console figure rather than adding to it, which means close to half of everything arriving from Google was coming from the map pack, not from an organic result. Every page title and meta description we had rewritten that year was acting on the other half.
Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence, and says outright that replying to reviews helps. For a Brisbane business selling to people within driving distance, the profile is free and most of it can be fixed in an afternoon: current photos, the right categories, a consistent address across directories, and every review answered.
In this order.
None of that needs a new acronym, a new tool or a rebuild. It needs a decision about what each page is for.
If your site is getting seen and not clicked, that's a structure and messaging problem, and it's fixable on the site you already have. See how we approach websites.
No. Generative engines lean on the same signals traditional search does: pages that answer questions clearly, consistent facts about your business, and mentions of you on other sites. Google's own guidance says AI Overviews need no special optimisation beyond SEO best practice. GEO is a new surface for the same work, not a replacement discipline, so a business with sound SEO foundations is already most of the way there.
Not a separate one. What earns a mention in ChatGPT is broadly what earns one anywhere: a self-contained answer near the top of each section, the same facts about your business everywhere they appear, and people talking about you somewhere other than your own site. The one ChatGPT-specific check worth making is technical. Its crawler doesn't run JavaScript, so your content needs to arrive as finished HTML.
It depends who's saying it. Most often AEO means answer engine optimisation: structuring content so it can be lifted into a direct answer such as a featured snippet, a People Also Ask box or a voice result. Increasingly it is also used for agent experience optimisation, which is about AI agents using a website on someone's behalf, booking or requesting a quote, rather than quoting it. Check which one a proposal means before you pay for it.
Not measurably, yet. An llms.txt file is a plain-text summary of your site written for AI tools, and it is still a proposal rather than a standard. No major AI search engine has confirmed it reads the file to decide what to cite. On Webflow it takes minutes to add, so we include one on our builds, but it isn't where AI visibility comes from. Clear pages and outside mentions are.
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