Have you noticed a dip in your website traffic? Or has a client mentioned they found you through a chatbot instead of a Google search? Business of Home's recent feature, “Can AI Find Your Firm,” addresses what many interior designers may have started to notice. The way people search is indeed changing. We’re here to make sense of it and to help AI recommend your firm.

With each new AI model rolled out comes new practices for search. That's exactly why we're sharing more of our thinking here. We’ll address what's changing, the real difference between SEO, GEO, AEO, and AIO, the metrics worth watching, and why articulating what makes you different has never mattered more. Our goal is to provide context on the current state of search so that designers can decide on the best path forward.

The Different Types of SEO & What They Do

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – Think of SEO as the foundation of your overall SEO strategy. This is the process of optimizing your online content, including keywords or phrases and a skimmable technical structure, to rank higher on traditional search engine results pages like Google or Pinterest.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) – Consider this the process of formatting content so that generative AI search engines, such as Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, or Google’s AI overviews, either reference, cite, and recommend your brand in their synthesized responses.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) – This practice focuses on capturing those quick wins. This is achieved by structuring your content in accessible formats for AI systems to easily extract and summarize your content as an answer. FAQs, tables, clear headings, and numbered or lettered lists are great places to start.
AIO (Artificial Intelligence Optimization) – The icing on the cake, so to speak, which includes understanding machine learning. AIO ensures that your digital real estate is formatted so that the community of large language models (LLMs) can efficiently scan and understand your purpose and position in the market and trust your content as a verified resource for its users.

You Don't Have to Rank #1 on Google Anymore

Roughly half of all Google searches now return an AI-generated answer. Layer on top of that, the rise of chatbot-based search through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and the old rules of ranking are giving way to new ones. Bring value and be the answer.

This shift rewards consistency. If weekly content isn't realistic for your team, publish less often but publish reliably. A steady cadence outperforms a sporadic one, every time. We also encourage clients to front-load their point. Gmail previews, text summaries, and AI overviews already surface the gist of your content before anyone opens it, so the most important thing needs to come first.

Does Your Existing SEO Investment Still Count? Yes.

If you've already spent time and money building traditional SEO, you're not starting over. Industry analysts increasingly agree that SEO and its newer neighbors, GEO, AEO, and AIO, share many of their best practices. The real differences lie in those last ten yards. Framing your writing to answer real questions alongside target keywords and building the kind of topical authority AI models trust enough to cite.

We don't lead client strategy meetings with a wall of acronyms. We start with your goals, then work backward to whichever mix of SEO, GEO, and AEO gets you there responsibly and efficiently. The core of our approach remains grounded in the organic fundamentals that have always mattered, such as original content, credible links, and a consistent brand voice.

Referrals are still the industry's bread and butter, but a growing share of new inquiries now start with a chatbot conversation. We like to encourage our clients to consider this path as a filter. When your content clearly articulates who you are and who your services are for, AI does some of your vetting for you by surfacing you to the clients who are already the right fit and quietly filtering out the ones who aren't.

How Do You Know If It's Working?

Honestly? The industry is still building the measurement playbook, and anyone who tells you otherwise is overselling. There's no AI equivalent yet of watching yourself climb from page three to page one of Google. But a few signals are worth tracking:

Visibility — are you showing up in AI answers at all
Share of voice — how often, relative to your competitors
Citations — is your content the source AI is pulling from

Movement in any of these is a good sign. Just don't expect a tidy dashboard quite yet. We're watching this space closely, so we can share the latest with you when that time comes.

Lead With Your Story, Not the Buzzwords

The disconnect we see most often is that the language the design industry uses internally rarely matches what a client actually types into a search bar or speaks to a chatbot. Ask your last few clients how they found you. What did they search for? What did they ask their AI of choice? Those answers are worth more than any keyword tool.

Ultimately, SEO’s umbrella is inseparable from your brand. The feeling your brand creates is the same feeling your interiors create for your own clients. Our job is to help you articulate that clearly, that when you're not in the room, AI can still speak for you accurately. A chatbot can only recommend what it understands, and it can't understand a firm that hasn't told its story or is unclear about who it is, what it offers, and who it supports.

Ready to Improve Your Firm's Visibility?

This is the work we do every day for our clients. If your brand messaging seems murky or you feel invisible online, let us help you turn your brand clarity into content that AI and the humans behind it can find. If you're ready to talk strategy, we're ready to listen.