Type a question into Google today and the first thing you read is often an answer written by AI. Ask Google's AI Mode which accountant in Sliema suits a small business and you get four names. For a business in Malta this changes what being found online means, and it has brought a wave of new acronyms with it: SEO, AEO, GEO, AIO, LLMO.
Malta is moving faster than most of Europe. In 2025, 46.5% of people aged 16 to 74 in Malta used generative AI tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini, the third highest share in the EU. In May 2026 the Government of Malta and OpenAI announced a programme that gives every citizen who completes an AI course a year of ChatGPT Plus. Many of your customers already use these tools, and some of them use them to choose a business.
This guide explains each term in plain words, how they differ, what the evidence says about clicks and visibility in 2026, and what a Malta business can do about it. Earlier this year we wrote about how AI search is changing things for Malta businesses. This guide goes further into the terms, the data and the practical steps.
Last updated: October 2026. Every figure was checked against its original source in October 2026, and we tested Google from Malta on 23 October 2026. Search is changing month by month, so we will update this guide as things move.
The short version
For twenty years search worked the same way. You typed a few words, Google showed ten links and you clicked one. That model still exists, but it now shares the page with answers written by AI, and a growing part of searching happens in chat assistants instead of a search box.
AI Overviews are the AI-written summaries at the top of many Google results, with links to the pages they used. Google says they reach more than 2.5 billion people a month (Google I/O, May 2026). Google's help pages list Malta among the countries where they are available, in English and in Maltese.
AI Mode is a separate tab in Google where you have a conversation: you ask, get a full answer with links, then ask follow-up questions. Google extended it to more than 40 new countries in October 2025, and Malta is now on its list of supported countries. By July 2026 AI Mode had passed 1 billion monthly users.
Chat assistants have become search tools in their own right. ChatGPT passed 1 billion weekly users in 2026, and Google's Gemini app passed 1 billion monthly users in August 2026. Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot also answer with sources.
On 23 October 2026 we ran a few searches on google.com.mt from Malta, logged out.
The last example shows the shift in one screen. The person gets four names and no list to compare. A firm that is missing from that list never gets considered, however good its website is.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the work that helps your website appear, and rank high, in search results on Google and Bing. Its three parts have not changed:
What changed is the reward for ranking. A first position used to mean a steady flow of visitors. In 2026 the same position can sit below an AI summary that answers the question before anyone scrolls. Ahrefs studied 300,000 keywords and found that when an AI Overview appears, the click-through rate of the top result is on average 58% lower (February 2026).
SEO is still the base for everything else in this guide. Google's AI features choose their sources from pages in Google's index. Google's guidance for site owners says that a page needs to be in Google's index and able to appear in normal results to be shown as a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that no special optimisation is needed beyond that.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work that makes your content the answer, meaning the text a search engine or assistant shows or reads out when someone asks a direct question. The term started with featured snippets and voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. In 2026 it mostly means AI Overviews and the answer boxes around them.
AEO is about how a page is written. An answer engine looks for a passage that answers the question clearly, close to the top, without the reader needing anything else.
Example. A dental clinic in Birkirkara has a page called "Our Services" with a list of treatments. Someone asks Google how much a dental implant costs in Malta. The clinic's page never mentions cost, so it cannot be the answer. A clinic with a short section titled "How much does a dental implant cost in Malta?", with a price range, what affects the price and how the first visit works, gives Google a passage it can quote.
In practice, AEO means:
A note on FAQs. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, so a FAQ no longer earns a special look in the results. It is still worth having, because it answers real questions in a form that people and AI tools can both read.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work that helps your business get recommended in answers generated by AI, in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Mode. The term comes from a research paper by a team from Princeton University and other institutions, first published in November 2023.
The difference from AEO is scope. AEO is about one page being the answer to one question. GEO is about the AI tool knowing what you do and why you are a good choice, from everything it can find about you across the web.
The Princeton team tested which changes to a web page made AI engines use it more, on 10,000 queries. Adding citations, quotations and statistics gave the biggest gains, around 30 to 40% more visibility. Stuffing pages with keywords did little, and on Perplexity it did worse than leaving the page alone. Pages that started lower gained the most. Citing sources lifted the fifth ranked source by 115%.
GEO also goes beyond your own website. An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands (May 2025) found that the number of times a brand is mentioned across the web was more closely linked to its presence in AI Overviews than its number of backlinks. A mention in a Maltese newspaper, a listing on a local directory or a place in a "best of" list is part of what an AI tool can find about you.
Example. A family-run restaurant in Valletta has a good website. A visitor planning a trip asks ChatGPT where to have a traditional Maltese lunch near the Upper Barrakka Gardens. The answer draws on what the web says about the restaurant: reviews, its Google Business Profile, a food blog, a tourism listing. A restaurant with its menu online as text, the same opening hours everywhere and recent reviews that mention rabbit stew and the Maltese platter gives the AI far more to work with than one that exists only as a Facebook page.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank your pages in search results | Be the direct answer to a question | Be mentioned and recommended by AI assistants |
| Where you appear | Google and Bing results, Google Maps | AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice answers | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Google AI Mode |
| What it relies on | Technical health, relevant content, links and reviews | Clear, well-structured answers on your pages | Your reputation across the web: mentions, reviews, listings, consistent details |
| How you measure it | Rankings, clicks and enquiries in Search Console and analytics | AI Overview impressions in Search Console, answers won | Manual checks of AI answers, AI referrals in analytics, Bing's AI citation report |
| Success looks like | A visitor clicks through to your site | Your text or figures appear in the answer, with a link | The assistant names your business and suggests it |
In practice the three overlap so much that you rarely work on one alone. A clear answer on a well-built page helps all three. Google's own guide on optimising for generative AI search, updated in July 2026, calls AEO and GEO "still SEO".
You can mostly ignore them. Agencies and software vendors use several names for the same ideas. It helps to recognise them, so you are never sold the same service twice under two names.
If someone offers you GEO as a package separate from SEO, ask what they will do that good SEO does not already cover. A good answer involves your Google Business Profile, reviews, directory listings, mentions on other sites and regular checks of AI answers. Those are real tasks, and they belong in the same plan as the rest of your SEO.
Each tool works differently, and none of them publishes its rules. The research and our own checks point to a few clear patterns.
AI tools do not read the whole internet every time you ask. Google's AI features pick their sources from Google's index. ChatGPT search reads websites with OpenAI's search crawler, called OAI-SearchBot, and OpenAI says sites that block it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Copilot uses Bing. If search engines cannot find and read your pages, AI tools are unlikely to quote them.
Ranking in the top 10 helps, and pages outside it get cited too. In March 2026 Ahrefs found that only 38% of the pages cited in AI Overviews also appeared in Google's top 10 for the same search, down from about 76% in July 2025. Ahrefs puts this down to Google running several related searches behind the scenes and picking passages that answer a specific angle. A clear page that ranks lower can still end up quoted.
When people look for a business nearby, your listing matters as much as your website. A BrightLocal study of about 200,000 local searches in the United States (September 2026) found that business websites made up 42% of the sources cited in AI answers, and Google Business Profiles 28.5%. Google's own guide says a Business Profile can help your products and services appear in AI responses.
When your opening hours say one thing on your website and another on Google, or an old address is still listed on a directory, an AI tool has to guess. The same details across your website, Google Business Profile, Facebook page and Maltese directories make your business easier to describe with confidence. Reviews that mention specific services and places, such as "quick boiler repair in Mosta", give AI tools words they can repeat.
Ask the same question twice and you may get a different list. BrightLocal found that repeated runs of the same local search shared only 21 to 33% of their cited sources. Treat any single check as a snapshot and look at the pattern over several weeks.
A few things make this shift arrive faster in Malta, and feel bigger, than in most of Europe.
Some traffic is moving from clicks to answers, and a US study shows how much. Pew Research Center tracked the searches of 900 adults in the United States in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a normal result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was none. They clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits, and they ended their browsing session more often (26% against 16%).
Being cited inside the answer softens the loss. Seer Interactive's analysis of 53 brands, published in April 2026 with 2025 data, found that on informational searches with an AI Overview, brands cited in the overview had a click-through rate of 2.07%, more than double the 0.94% of brands that were not cited.
For most small businesses in Malta, the searches that bring customers are ready-to-buy searches: "plumber in Naxxar", "wedding venue in Gozo", "office chairs Malta". Those people still want to get in touch. The aim is to be the business the answer names, and to make it easy to act once they reach your site. If your current site is slow or hard to update, that second part starts with a website built for search.
We help Malta businesses with SEO that covers AI search too: pages that answer real questions, structured data, a complete Google Business Profile, consistent listings and regular checks of what AI tools say about you. See our SEO services in Malta, or our AI solutions if you want AI working on your own website, for example a chatbot that answers customer questions.
SEO helps your website rank in search results. AEO helps your content become the direct answer to a question, for example in Google AI Overviews. GEO helps your business get mentioned and recommended in answers written by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode. AEO and GEO build on SEO, and most of the work overlaps.
Yes. Google's AI features and ChatGPT search pick their sources from websites that search engines have read, so a site that search engines can read and trust is also the site AI tools are most likely to use. Clicks from informational searches are falling, which makes it more important to appear in the answer and to turn the visitors you do get into enquiries.
There is no fixed timeline, and nobody can promise a result. Changes to your own pages are picked up once search engines crawl them again. Reviews and mentions on other sites build up over months. Because answers vary from one try to the next, judge progress over several weeks of checks.
A strong Business Profile helps a lot for local searches, but in BrightLocal's 2026 study business websites were still the largest single source cited in local AI answers. Your website is where you explain your services, prices and answers in full, and it is the page AI tools link to when they cite you.
OpenAI does not say which search providers ChatGPT search relies on. It does say that ChatGPT reads websites with its own search crawler, and that sites blocking it are left out of ChatGPT search answers. Microsoft Copilot runs on Bing, so it is worth setting up Bing Webmaster Tools and Bing Places as well as Google's tools.
All figures were checked against the original sources in October 2026. Eurostat figures cover people aged 16 to 74 in 2025, and the EU figure is the EU27 average. Several studies on clicks and citations were carried out in the United States: we use them to show the direction of travel, and we say so where it matters. Our searches from Malta were run on google.com.mt on 23 October 2026, logged out. StatCounter measures page views on the sites in its network, not people.
