SEO for Manufacturing: What AEO and GEO Mean for Your Business
Buyers don’t search the way they used to, and that’s definitely true in manufacturing.
At the Manufacturing Resilience Forum: Digitalisation Live in Leeds, our Head of Communications, Jessica Farrow, took to the stage to unpack exactly what that shift means for manufacturers, and what to do about it.
Here’s a recap of her session, and how we can help you put it into practice.
The New Era of Search
Traditional search was simple: type a query into Google, click a result, land on a website, make an enquiry. That journey has now transformed. Buyers now research using a mix of Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Copilot, often skipping straight to a shortlist of suppliers before they ever visit a website.
Question-style searches are driving this shift. The number of question-based queries rose from 8% to 21% between 2023 and 2026, a 163% increase in just three years.
Buyers are asking direct questions, like “which manufacturers hold ISO 9001 certification?” or “who can manufacture this in the UK?” and expecting an AI-generated answer at the top of the page.
For manufacturers, that means you’re now competing to be the answer to the queries your buyers are searching.
SEO vs AEO vs GEO
Jessica’s session broke down the three disciplines manufacturers now need to understand:
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): makes your website easy for search engines to crawl, so it ranks higher and earns more clicks.
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation): makes sure your site clearly and directly answers the specific questions buyers are asking.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): makes your website easier for generative AI to understand, trust and reference when it’s building an answer or a shortlist.
The common thread is credibility. SEO gets you found AEO gets you the answer, and GEO gets you trusted by AI itself. Manufacturers need all three working together.
Why This Matters for Manufacturers
AI only recommends what it can find, understand and trust. If your certifications, your capabilities and what makes you different aren’t clearly written down and easy for AI to crawl, you simply won’t be part of the conversation, no matter how good your work is.
This means making sure your existing expertise is structured and accessible: answering real buyer questions in plain language, keeping accreditations current and easy to find, and using schema markup so AI can extract the facts it needs.
Buyers are increasingly being short-listed before they land on a single manufacturer’s website, so if you’re invisible to AI, you’re invisible at the exact moment decisions are being made.
Results in Action: Imageco
Our team of dedicated experts delivered excellent results for Imageco, a Leeds-based wide-format print and signage manufacturer we’ve worked with as their dedicated marketing team. Our SEO strategy focused on the search terms that mattered most to their business, including “cardboard engineering,” “billboards” and “sustainable exhibitions,” and got them consistently ranking on page one of Google for those terms.
The results followed directly from that visibility:
- 33% increase in organic traffic year on year
- 29% increase in page views year on year
- 23% increase in visits to the contact page
A strong SEO foundation is perfect for search engines to view your site as a credible source.
How Our Team Can Help
AEO and GEO are the next evolution of SEO for manufacturing, and they need the same strategic approach: understanding your buyers’ real questions, structuring your site so both people and AI can find the answers, and building the trust signals that get you recommended.
Jessica and our team of experts specialise in doing this for manufacturers, every day.
If you’re not sure whether your site would show up when a buyer, or an AI, goes looking for a business like yours, get in touch with the Halston B2B team.
We can support you to gain real visibility into how you show up, and how to improve this. Looking for a head start? Contact our team to benchmark your visibility.