Rank on a search results page
Be the answer an AI assistant gives
Google, Maps, other search engines
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and similar
Keywords, backlinks, page structure
Accurate, structured, consistent information
A search engine's crawler and ranking algorithm
An AI model synthesizing one answer
You don't choose one over the other — most businesses need both, since customers are searching both ways at once. But AEO is the newer of the two, and almost nobody has optimized for it yet.
For restaurants specifically, here's what this means →