Do you know what ChatGPT says when a customer asks about your industry?

They overlap, but they're not the same. SEO optimizes for a search engine to show your page in a list of results; GEO optimizes for an answer engine to name you inside the text it generates.

Now, the honest part: much of what moves the needle in GEO is authority and content, not tricks. That's why Apoda's action plan includes work any SEO agency would recognize right away — and why you should be wary of anyone selling you a secret lever.

Yes. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) name the same work: getting an AI assistant to mention your business inside the answer it writes. Both acronyms exist because they come from two different conversations — GEO from academia and generative models, AEO from the SEO world — that ended up in the same place. «AI visibility» is the plain-language way to say it.

Apoda uses GEO as its main term and AEO as a synonym. If someone offers you GEO and AEO as two separate services at two separate prices, it's worth asking exactly how they differ.

We complement it. Your agency works on what happens on the results page: what content you produce, what position you hold, what links you earn. We work on what happens inside an assistant's answer: whether it names you, where in the text, with what sentiment, next to which competitors, and citing which sources.

They're two different surfaces that share inputs. In practice, we pass your agency the findings that help them, and we execute what falls outside their scope.

Because we keep the evidence. Every run is recorded with the exact prompt, the engine, the date, the time and the full text of the answer. We don't hand you a number: we hand you the answers, and you can read them one by one.

The same goes for sentiment. When we report that an engine speaks well or badly of your business, it comes with the exact sentence that says so. A label you can't audit is worth nothing.

This also covers the uncomfortable case: when an answer says something wrong about your business, the text is right there.

Partially, and it's worth knowing why. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links in its citations, so that traffic arrives labeled. The other engines rely on the referrer, which gets lost when the link is opened from a mobile app: that traffic lands in your analytics marked as direct.

That's why we report three things separately: visible, labeled traffic; an estimated range of dark traffic; and the increase in branded searches. We call that a signal, not attribution. Anyone who promises you exact attribution from a mention to a sale is selling you a certainty that doesn't exist today.

Source for the utm_source detail: OpenAI help center, Publishers and Developers FAQ.

Because the pages an engine cites when it answers in Spanish are not the same ones it cites when it answers in English. Measuring with prompts in the wrong language gives you a portrait of a different market.

So we measure in the language your customers actually use. For a business in South Florida that sells to both English and Spanish speakers, those are two different answers — and it's common to show up in one and be missing from the other.

It's the most common starting point, and it isn't fixed in a month. We say so before you sign.

The first step is ruling out the mechanical problems: checking whether the AI companies' bots can read your site, because a surprising share of businesses are blocked without knowing it. Then comes the structural part: seeing which pages the engines cite to answer about your category, and what those pages have that yours doesn't. It's almost always one of two things: the answer to your customer's question doesn't exist on your site, or it exists buried in a page about something else.