AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what's the difference?

What do AEO, SEO and GEO mean?

SEO earns a ranked link, AEO earns the extracted direct answer, and GEO earns a mention or citation inside an AI-written answer. Each name arrived when search changed shape, and the work behind them overlaps far more than the vendor pitches suggest.

SEO: search engine optimization

SEO gets a site crawled, indexed and ranked for the queries its buyers type. The output is a position in a list of links, scored in rankings, clicks and conversions. The work spans technical health, content that matches search intent, and authority signals such as links.

AEO: answer engine optimization

Answer engine optimization formats content so a system can lift a direct answer from it: a featured snippet, a People Also Ask entry, a voice assistant reply or an AI summary. The term predates the current wave of AI search; Jason Barnard of Kalicube says he coined it in 20186 (Kalicube). Marketing teams now use it as a near-synonym for GEO.

GEO: generative engine optimization

The name comes from the paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal and colleagues, posted in November 2023 and accepted at KDD 20241 (arXiv). It targets systems that retrieve sources and then write an answer with a language model. In the paper, adding quotations, statistics and cited sources raised a source's visibility in generated answers by up to 40%, and keyword stuffing made things worse. Our full GEO guide includes a before/after rewrite mapped to those findings.

How do AEO, SEO and GEO compare side by side?

The goal and the scoreboard differ most; the tactics differ least.

Read the tactics row as emphasis, since AEO and GEO borrow almost all of SEO's toolkit. The metrics row carries the real change. GEO numbers are rates across repeated prompts, because AI answers change from run to run. Our guide on how to measure AI visibility works through the formulas with a sample prompt set.

AEO vs SEO: what's actually different?

SEO competes for a ranked position and the click that follows it; AEO competes to be the one answer a search feature or assistant lifts from a page, often with no click at all. The same page usually has to do both, because Google's AI features only draw on pages that are indexed and eligible to show a snippet2.

The extra AEO work happens at the passage level. A quick test: take a question your page already ranks top five for, find the heading that matches it, and read the first sentence on its own. If that sentence doesn't answer the question without the paragraph around it, you have an AEO fix. Rewrite it as a 40 to 60 word answer that names the subject, and push the caveats and examples below.

Before: "Payroll is something every growing business has to think
        about, and there are many factors to weigh."
After:  "Full-service payroll software calculates pay, withholds and
        files payroll taxes, and pays staff by direct deposit. For a
        10 to 50 person US company, the main choice is an all-in-one
        HR suite or a payroll-only tool."

One old AEO habit needs updating. Since August 2023, Google has shown FAQ rich results only for "well-known, authoritative government and health websites," according to the Google Search Central Blog9. Google added that there's no need to remove existing FAQPage markup, so keep it where it matches the visible text, but don't count on it to win extra space in the results.

The decision rule we use: if a page ranks but doesn't own the snippet or the AI Overview citation, that page needs AEO work. If it doesn't rank at all, it's an SEO problem, and reformatting won't fix it.

Most of the work on your own site is identical

Generative engines mostly find sources through search, so a page that can't be crawled, indexed and ranked is rarely cited. Google spells this out: to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and "there are no additional technical requirements"2 (Google Search Central). Its guide to generative AI features says those features rely on Google's core ranking and quality systems3 (Google). Outside Google, OpenAI says ChatGPT search typically rewrites a question into one or more targeted queries sent to search providers4 (OpenAI).

So the on-site checklist is the same whichever acronym is on the invoice: main content present in the HTML, headings phrased as real questions with the answer in the first sentence, specific and sourced claims, structured data that matches the visible page, and one consistent description of your company as an entity across the web.

GEO vs SEO: what changes when AI writes the answer?

GEO moves the payoff away from the click and away from your own domain. Three shifts explain most of the difference.

The click is optional. Pew Research found that Google users clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when none did, and clicked a link inside the summary in only 1% of visits5 (Pew Research Center). Being named in the answer has value with no visit attached, which makes GEO closer to brand marketing than to traffic acquisition. See zero-click search.

Rank no longer settles who gets cited. Ahrefs found in July 2025 that 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews ranked in the top 10. A March 2026 update with 4 million cited URLs put that at 37.9%, which Ahrefs attributes to pages found through query fan-out7 (Ahrefs). Ranking still helps. It's just one input now.

Sites you don't own carry the recommendation. In Profound's analysis of 680 million citations, Wikipedia made up 47.9% of ChatGPT's top 10 cited sources and Reddit 46.7% of Perplexity's8 (Profound). That pulls review management, community participation and PR into the budget. Our analysis of how AI engines choose sources breaks this down by engine.

GEO vs AEO: is there a real difference?

In daily practice there's very little, and most agencies and tools now use the two terms interchangeably. The useful distinction is the unit of success. AEO grew up around a single extracted answer, one featured snippet or one voice reply, where the winning page takes the whole slot. GEO deals with answers synthesized from several sources, where a ChatGPT or Perplexity reply might name four vendors and cite six URLs, so the goal is to be one of those names and links across many runs.

That changes where the work happens. AEO is mostly on-page formatting. GEO also has to reach the third-party pages engines cite for your category (review sites, Reddit threads, Wikipedia, comparison articles), because a generated "best X" answer leans on what others say about you. A team that calls its work AEO and only edits its own pages is skipping the off-site half of GEO.

Which should you prioritize? A decision table by situation

Find the row that describes you. The thresholds are our editorial rules of thumb, not industry standards; they're there so you can make a call instead of hearing "it depends".

If you fit two rows, the higher one wins. An unindexed site can't benefit from off-site GEO work until its own pages are findable.

If you're hiring help, start from Google's own warning: its guide tells site owners to be cautious of third-party AEO or GEO tactics and tools that promise ranking success3. Whatever a vendor calls the service, ask which prompts and engines it will measure, how many runs per prompt, and which off-site work is included. A vendor who can't answer is selling a label. Our comparison of GEO agencies has the longer list of sales-call questions and red flags. It ranks Arobis AI, the publisher of this site, first for AI visibility work for B2B SaaS.

AI SEO, LLM SEO, LLMO and AI visibility: same job, different labels

AI SEO is the slippery one, because it's used two ways: optimizing for AI search surfaces, or using AI tools to do ordinary SEO work. Check which a vendor means before you sign anything. LLM SEO and LLMO (large language model optimization) describe the same activities as GEO, with LLMO often used when the focus is how a model describes a brand from its training data. AI search optimization is a plain-language umbrella for all of it.

AI visibility is the outcome all of these labels chase. It means how often and how favorably AI answers mention your brand and cite your pages. For a free read on whether ChatGPT names your brand for buyer prompts, run the Arobis AI visibility checker. For the market numbers behind the shift, see our AI search statistics.

Frequently asked questions

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