// Straight answer
Short answer
AEO and GEO are names for the work of making a business findable, quotable and accurately described in AI answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI features. It can work in Lebanon, partly because local and Arabic answers are thin, but it cannot be guaranteed. The work is fixing crawl problems, stating who you are consistently, and publishing real answers, then measuring.
Answered by Tarek Abou Rjeily, AI consultant & builder in Beirut, for businesses in Lebanon and the Gulf.
AEO is answer engine optimization. GEO is generative engine optimization. Both are labels for the same practical goal: when someone asks an AI assistant or an AI search feature a question your business should be able to answer, the assistant can find you, understands what you do, and describes you correctly.
For Google's own AI features, Google says this is still ordinary search fundamentals: useful pages, crawlable links, clear text and structured data that matches what is on the page. There is no special AI markup you can add. The extra work in AEO/GEO is measuring several different assistants, which each have their own crawlers, sources and habits, instead of assuming one ranking.
Assistants answer from what they can retrieve, and for Lebanese businesses there is often not much good material to retrieve. In two AI-visibility programmes Tarek Abou Rjeily runs for Lebanese consultancies, SSK Consultancy and Exponential, the firms that did appear in category answers got there through directories, programme pages and press rather than their own websites. On some category questions the engines cited no firm at all.
On Exponential, asked who the firm is, one engine replied that no such entity existed and listed unrelated companies abroad with the same name. A separate check on 25 September 2026 found that answers about the leading AI people in Lebanon were mostly assembled from directory rankings, Wikipedia biographies, Lebanese press and a few self-published roundups. Where clear, sourced local answers are thin, a business that publishes them faces less competition than it would in London or New York. That is an opportunity, not a promise.
It starts with eligibility, because a page nobody can crawl cannot be cited. On Exponential's domain, for example, the sitemap returned 404, robots.txt had no rules, canonicals pointed at URLs that redirected elsewhere and OpenAI's crawler was being rate-limited; fixing those moved crawl and index eligibility from 4 of 20 to about 18 of 20 on the audit rubric. That figure measures eligibility, not citations. After that comes entity and evidence work, then content, then measurement.
Nobody can guarantee a citation. Answers vary by assistant, country, language and day, and they depend heavily on third-party sources you do not control. Citations move slowly, and a result observed after a change is not proof that the change caused it. A programme should report what was fixed and what was observed, not rankings.
It is also not for everyone. If your customers find you through word of mouth, a walk-in location or a handful of referral partners, and none of them ask an AI assistant first, you may get more from fixing your Google Business Profile or your follow-up. The quickest way to find out is a baseline: Tarek Abou Rjeily's 48-hour AI Audit includes an AI-visibility baseline and a written report you keep either way, and a short check of your own questions in a fresh chat costs nothing.
Making two consultancies legible to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI: crawler access, entity schema, llms.txt, and a fixed prompt set measured on a schedule.
Read case study →Bilingual (EN/AR) site for a global management-consulting firm. Scroll-driven 3D globe hero, five service pillars, Resend-powered booking flow, edge-deployed on Cloudflare.
View live →They overlap heavily. Google says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO fundamentals. AEO/GEO adds measurement across other assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot) that use their own crawlers and sources, and more attention to how your business is described across the web.
It can, mainly where your buyers already ask assistants for recommendations and where local answers are thin. It does not work as a shortcut: it needs real pages, consistent profiles and months of patience, and nobody can promise a placement.
In practice yes. Arabic answers are built from Arabic sources, so an English-only business can be invisible in Arabic even if it is visible in English. Write the Arabic for Arabic readers rather than machine-translating line by line, and test both languages.
No. Treat any guarantee of ChatGPT placement as a warning sign. What a good engagement gives you is a dated baseline, a list of evidence-backed fixes, the fixes implemented within scope, and re-tests that show what changed.
The method does: crawl access, consistent entity facts, answer-first pages and measurement are the same. The sources differ by market, so the directories, press and platforms that matter in the UAE or Saudi Arabia are not the ones that matter in Lebanon, and each market needs its own prompt set.
Third-party facts can change. These primary sources were checked on the page's update date.
Send the question on WhatsApp and I'll tell you honestly whether it needs building, buying, or fixing by hand.
Ask on WhatsApp →