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How an AI finds, names and books a local business.

Seven plain explainers, written for an owner who has heard the words a hundred times and never had them explained. A local plumber is the running example. Every number is sourced; nothing is for sale on these pages.

By Ryan Bolden, Synthetic Neurons · Updated 22 September 2026

01What is SEO?How a search engine crawls, indexes and ranks, what page one meant for a local business, and what AI Overviews changed. 02What is AEO?What an answer engine is, how an answer differs from a list, and what being the answer means for a plumber. 03What is GEO?How a generative engine retrieves, verifies and cites, and why one plumber gets named and another does not. 04LLMO, AIO, AI SEO and the restWhich acronyms mean the same thing under a different name, which are genuinely different, and which to ignore. 05What is AI visibility?What the AI reads about you, why it names two to four businesses, and what a visibility score measures. 06What is an AI receptionist?What happens on the call, what booking the job actually means, and what the software cannot do. 07GlossaryEvery term from the explainers, defined in one plain sentence each. 08Content still wins. The rules changed.What a search engine rewards versus what an AI reader rewards, with the studies, and how to write for the reader without being flagged. TrendsEarly in cheap, late in pay-to-playGoogle, Meta, Amazon, Uber, DoorDash and Yelp let early users in cheap, then raised the price. Our forecast for AI recommendation.

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