Marketing Solutions in Cambodia.

Cambodian buyers now start in two places: a Google results page that answers before it links, and an AI assistant that answers without linking at all. SEO covers the first. AEO and GEO cover the second, which is getting your business named inside what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Mode say when someone asks who to hire. The work is the same discipline either way: an entity search engines can identify, pages that answer the question in the first paragraph, and evidence a model is willing to repeat. Monthly retainer, quoted on scope after an audit.

What does Scale's Marketing Solutions practice cover?

Two retainers against one problem: being found when a Cambodian buyer goes looking. SEO covers the Google results page, where ranking still decides who gets the click. AEO and GEO cover the answer itself, meaning Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT Search, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude, where an assistant summarises the market and names two or three firms. Both run monthly and both are quoted on scope after an audit.

The reason they sit in one practice is that they share a spine. An engine can only recommend a business it can identify, and it can only quote a page that answers the question in the first paragraph. Entity records, schema, site architecture, answer-first writing and evidence worth repeating serve the ranked list and the generated answer at the same time. What differs is the scoreboard: positions and clicks on one side, citations and mentions on the other.

The split is real enough to measure separately, though. Roughly 12% of the pages AI engines cite also sit in Google's top ten for the same query, so a business can rank well and go unmentioned, or be quoted constantly while sitting on page two. We report both because optimising for one and assuming the other follows is how most of this budget gets wasted.

Cambodia changes the weighting more than the method. Search volumes here are small enough that a single well-built page can own a category, competition is thin outside the obvious head terms, and most local competitors have no schema, no entity records and a backlink profile bought by the thousand. The upside is that the fundamentals still win. The catch is that nothing here is quick: with volumes this low, a ranking change of three positions can mean fifteen more sessions a month, and the honest unit of progress is a quarter.

Do you need SEO, AEO, or both?

If buyers already search for what you sell, start with SEO. If they mostly ask other people, and increasingly that means asking an assistant, start with AEO and GEO. Most Cambodian businesses need the SEO foundation first regardless, because the entity records, schema and answer-first pages that make a site rank are the same assets an AI engine reads before it decides whether to name you.

• SEO first: you sell something with existing search demand (accounting software, POS, ERP, web development, logistics), you have a Google Business Profile worth ranking in the local pack, and your current pages have no schema or a technical problem underneath them.
• AEO and GEO first: your category is researched rather than searched, you sell to buyers who ask an assistant to shortlist vendors, or you are entering a market where you have no ranking history and no time to build one.
• Both, sequenced: the usual answer. The audit fixes the technical floor, the content programme builds the cluster, and the entity work runs in parallel because Wikidata and directory records take weeks of waiting rather than weeks of effort.
• Neither, yet: if your site cannot take an enquiry, loads badly on a Cambodian mobile connection, or sells something you are still redefining, ranking it early just makes a weak page more visible. We will say so.

What we will not sell you

Four things this market sells routinely that we refuse, because each is either dead, devalued, or actively harmful. We would rather lose the pitch than take a retainer for work we know does not move the number.

• Bought backlinks and private blog networks. Google's March 2026 link-spam update devalued the whole category, and an inherited PBN profile is the single most common ceiling we find on a Cambodian site: nothing else you do ranks until it is disavowed.
• Mass FAQPage schema. The rich result has been gone for non-government and non-health sites since August 2023, and HowTo was phased out in 2024. Visible question-and-answer sections still earn their place as content. The markup no longer buys anything.
• High-volume AI-generated pages. Publishing dozens of thin pages a month invites a site-wide quality demotion, and the recovery takes longer than the programme that caused it.
• llms.txt as a deliverable. Adoption sits near 0.1% of AI crawler requests and no major vendor has confirmed production use. It costs an hour to add, so we add it, but it is not a line item.