Growth
2026-10-08 · 8 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
Search Engine Optimization has always had one job: get a web page to rank high enough in a results list that a human clicks it. Everything under the SEO umbrella, backlinks, title tags, page speed, keyword placement, exists to move a URL up that list. The unit of success is a click, and the destination is always your own website.
This model worked for twenty-five years because Google's results page was mostly a list of links with short snippets underneath. The searcher did the reading. Your job was to be the most relevant, most trustworthy link in that list, then let your page do the convincing.
That model rewarded a specific skill set: writing comprehensive pages, earning links from other credible sites, and making sure crawlers could read and index everything cleanly. None of that disappears under AEO, but the finish line moves from being the best link in a list to being the best source to quote, which is a different kind of writing discipline, not just a new checklist bolted onto the old one.
“SEO earns you a click. AEO earns you a mention, and increasingly, the mention is all the searcher ever sees.”
Answer Engine Optimization is the practice of getting your business or information cited directly inside an AI-generated answer, whether that is Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or a voice assistant. The searcher often never visits a website at all. They read the synthesized answer, see your brand named as a source (or not), and move on. Some practitioners call this GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, same idea, different name.
The mechanics are different from classic SEO. Instead of optimizing a page to be the best single result, you are optimizing content to be easily extractable, quotable, and trustworthy enough for a language model to pull a sentence or two out of it and attribute it to you. That means direct, self-contained answers near the top of a page, clear structure, and content that reads well out of context, because it will be read out of context.
Technical signals still matter, structured data, clean HTML, crawlability, but the content itself has to be written differently. A page optimized purely for ranking can bury the answer under three paragraphs of preamble. A page optimized for AI citation has to answer the question in the first forty to sixty words, because that is roughly what gets lifted.
Zero-click search has been climbing for years, but AI Overviews and chat-based assistants accelerated it sharply through 2024 and 2025. A growing share of informational queries, "what is," "how to," "best X for Y", now get answered on the results page or inside a chat window, with no click required. For businesses that relied on organic traffic for awareness, this is a real shift in where the value gets captured.
It does not mean organic search traffic disappears. Transactional and high-intent queries, "book a hotel in Pokhara," "CRM pricing Nepal", still send clicks, because the searcher needs to actually complete an action on a specific site. What is shrinking is the middle: generic informational queries that used to drive blog traffic are increasingly answered without a visit.
For Nepal specifically, this shift is arriving slightly later than in US or European markets, but it is arriving. English-language queries about Nepali services and products increasingly surface AI-generated summaries, even where Nepali-language search has not seen the same intensity of AI Overview rollout yet. A business that waits for clear local proof before adapting risks starting from behind once the shift accelerates here too, since early, consistently cited sources tend to keep being cited.
In practice, AEO is not a replacement for SEO, it is built on top of it. A page cannot get cited in an AI answer if it cannot first be crawled, indexed, and understood, which is still fundamentally an SEO job. The overlap is large: both reward clear writing, genuine expertise, and pages that actually answer the question they claim to answer. Thin, keyword-stuffed content fails at both.
The difference shows up in a handful of tactical choices. SEO content can lead with a hook and build an argument over several paragraphs because a human reader will stay for it. AEO content needs the direct answer first, supporting detail after, because the extraction happens from the top of the page. SEO rewards backlinks as a trust signal. AEO rewards being named consistently and accurately across other sources, directories, review sites, press mentions, because that is part of how a model judges whether to trust and cite you.
There is also a measurement difference worth internalizing early. SEO success is visible in Search Console as clicks and impressions you can track weekly. AEO success is often invisible in any dashboard at all, you have to run the actual queries yourself and read what comes back, which makes it a more manual, judgment-based discipline for now than the analytics-driven world SEO has become.
Most small and mid-sized businesses in Nepal do not yet need a dedicated AEO strategy, they need basic SEO done properly: a fast, indexable website, honest content that answers real customer questions, and a correctly filled-out Google Business Profile. That foundation is also the foundation AEO builds on, so it is not wasted effort either way.
Where AEO starts to matter sooner than people expect is category-defining or comparison content, the "X vs Y" and "how much does X cost" type queries that are exactly what AI Overviews love to summarize. If your business lives or dies on being found for those queries, structuring a few key pages for direct answers is worth doing now rather than in two years, because the businesses that get cited first tend to keep getting cited as models reinforce existing patterns.
Arcetis has been working specifically on this since 2019, under a Nepal-registered, VAT-registered company since 2026, and describes itself as Nepal's first dedicated AEO and GEO practice. That is a narrow, honest claim: not that AI answer visibility can be guaranteed, nobody can promise that, but that structuring content and technical signals for answer engines is a specific skill set distinct from traditional SEO, and most Nepali agencies have not built it yet.
No. AEO depends on the same technical foundation as SEO, crawlability, indexing, site speed, and it rewards similar qualities, clarity and genuine expertise. Think of it as a more specific discipline layered on top of SEO rather than a separate category competing with it.
Not cleanly yet. Google Search Console shows clicks and impressions for traditional search, but there is no universal dashboard showing how often your business is cited inside an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer. Most practitioners track this manually, running representative queries and recording whether and how a brand appears, which is slower and less precise than standard analytics.
Worry is the wrong word, but it is worth structuring your most important pages, pricing, comparisons, "how to" guides, with a direct answer near the top. That single change helps both human readers who are scanning and AI systems that are extracting, and it costs nothing beyond a rewrite.