AEO vs GEO vs SEO: What's Actually Different

AEO vs GEO vs SEO: What's Actually Different

AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are two names for the same goal: getting your brand named, and your pages cited, in the answers that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews write. The two terms come from different places and people stress different parts of the work, but the tactics and the metrics overlap almost completely. SEO is the older discipline both of them sit on: an AI engine that searches the web can only cite pages it can crawl and index.

The short version: SEO gets a page into the list of results, AEO gets a passage lifted into the answer, and GEO gets your brand into the answer when the engine compares options. Most teams now run all three as one program.

AEO, GEO and SEO in one table

The AEO and GEO columns describe the emphasis each term usually carries. In practice the same engines, the same pages and the same measurement serve both.

Where each term comes from

SEO is the familiar one: you optimize pages so a search engine ranks them, and people click through.

AEO came out of SEO practice. Before generative AI, "answer engine" meant Google's featured snippets, knowledge panels and voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, which read out one answer instead of a list. AEO meant writing so your page became that answer: the question as a heading, a direct two- or three-sentence answer under it, and structured data where it helped. When ChatGPT and Perplexity arrived, the same practitioners applied the same word to them.

GEO came from academic research. The paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, first posted in November 2023) coined the term and tested how rewriting a source page changed its visibility in generated answers. Its headline result, a visibility gain of up to 40% in the authors' benchmark, is often quoted without its condition: the pages were already among the sources the engine had retrieved. A 2026 review of 45 GEO studies (Martinez, arXiv:2607.14035) makes the same point. Editing a page helps once the engine has pulled it in, but no technique the review covered showed a stable effect, across platforms, on getting a page found in the first place.

So AEO is a practitioner's word that grew into AI search, and GEO is a researcher's word that marketers adopted. Vendors and agencies use whichever one their buyers search for, and many sell the same service under both.

Where people draw the line between AEO and GEO

The distinction you will see most often is about the shape of the answer:

• AEO for questions with one answer. "What is a 529 plan?" "How long should a cover letter be?" The engine needs one clear passage, and the page that states it plainly, near the top, under a heading that matches the question, is the one most likely to be quoted.
• GEO for questions where the engine compares and recommends. "Best accounting software for a 10-person agency." "Is X or Y better for a small team?" The answer names several brands and usually draws on more than your site: review sites, roundups, forums, comparison pages. Whether you are recommended depends on what those sources say about you as much as on your own page.

That split is useful for planning content. It does not hold up as a definition, because every major engine does both. ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews lift passages for definitions and write recommendation lists for buying questions, often in the same conversation. A team doing only narrow "AEO" would miss the questions that sell its product. A team doing only narrow "GEO" would neglect the plain answers on its own pages that engines quote.

You will also see LLMO (large language model optimization), AI search optimization and AI visibility used for the same practice. "AI SEO" is the exception: it also means using AI tools to do classic SEO.

How AEO and GEO depend on SEO

AEO and GEO do not replace SEO. Most of the work still runs through it.

When an AI engine searches the web before answering, it picks sources from a search index. Google says there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in regular Search, and no special markup or AI text file is needed. ChatGPT and Perplexity fetch pages with their own crawlers, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. A page that search engines cannot read is invisible to all of them.

Two findings show where SEO stops being enough:

• Ranking is not the same as being cited. A 2026 study (Kirsten et al., ACL 2026) found that 53% of the domains cited by Google AI Overviews were not in the organic top 10 for the same query. Ranking gets you considered; it does not decide what the answer quotes.
• Many answers involve no search at all. Schulte et al. (2026) found that in 57.8% of repeated ChatGPT runs on the prompts they tested, the model answered from memory without searching the web. For those answers, what counts is what the model learned about your brand from the sites it was trained on, most of which are other people's pages.

That is why AEO and GEO spend more time than SEO on two things: passages that make sense when quoted on their own, and your presence on the third-party pages engines read.

What to actually do

The work has four layers. The first is plain SEO; the other three are where AEO and GEO add something.

1. Make sure engines can read you. Allow the search crawlers in robots.txt (Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot at minimum), serve your main content in the HTML instead of only after JavaScript runs, and remove noindex tags and snippet restrictions from pages you want quoted. The technical GEO audit checklist covers each check.

2. Write passages that can be quoted alone. Put the direct answer in the first sentence or two under each heading. Name the subject instead of writing "it" or "this tool". Give numbers with their source and date. A passage an engine can lift without the paragraph before it is a passage it can cite.

3. Cover the questions that compare. For each buying question in your category ("best X for Y", "X vs Y", "X alternatives"), have a page that answers it honestly, including where a competitor is the better fit. A buyer who asks an engine to compare options gets an answer assembled from pages like these, so make sure yours is one of them.

4. Show up where engines look. Find out which third-party pages the answers in your category cite, then work on being listed accurately there: review profiles, industry roundups, directories, forums, partner pages. In our own October 2026 check of 12 ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini answers about AI visibility software, the two most-named tools each appeared in 10 of the 12 answers. One of them had no page in Google's top 10 for any of the 30 related searches we checked, so its place in those answers did not come from its own rankings.

What you can skip: Google has said Search does not use llms.txt files, and that there is no special schema for its AI features. Schema markup still earns rich results in regular search, so keep it where it already helps.

How to measure AEO and GEO

There is no single rank to check, so measurement takes more setup than SEO:

1. Pick a fixed set of questions your buyers ask, written the way they would type them into ChatGPT. Keep questions that already contain your brand name separate: they name you back and inflate the result.
2. Ask each engine on a schedule and record two things per answer: whether your brand is named in the text, and whether one of your pages is cited as a source. They are different outcomes and move for different reasons.
3. Compare yourself with competitors on the same answers. Your share of answers that name you, next to each competitor's share, is your AI share of voice.
4. Expect noise. The same question asked twice can come back with different sources: Kirsten et al. measured 9 to 28% of citation decisions changing between identical runs. One check is a sample, not a result.
5. Test changes against a control. To learn whether a page update worked, compare the questions it should affect with similar questions it should not, over repeated runs. A rate that rose everywhere may have risen for reasons unrelated to your edit. The Prominara methodology describes how we run that comparison.

Which term should you use?

Use the one your audience uses. If you report to an SEO lead, "AEO" will land; if you write for a CMO or read research, "GEO" is more common. In keyword tools and ad platforms, remember that "GEO" also means geographic targeting, so searches for "geo tools" or "geo SEO" are often about something else.

Whatever you call it, judge the work by the same test: across a fixed set of buyer questions, do AI answers name and cite you more often than before, and more often than your competitors?

Related reading

• GEO beginner guide: how ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews choose their sources
• What is AEO?: answer engine optimization in more depth
• GEO vs SEO: what changes for an SEO team
• Best AEO tools: paid and free tools for tracking AI answers