AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) vs GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Very little in practice. Both mean optimizing so AI engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews mention or cite your brand. AEO started as an SEO term for featured snippets and voice answers; GEO was introduced in a 2023 research paper on generative search. Some writers use AEO for short, single answers and GEO for longer answers that compare several sources, but the tactics and the metrics are the same.

AEO stands for answer engine optimization: making your pages easy for AI answer engines to quote, and making your brand likely to be named when someone asks about your category. An answer engine is any system that replies with a written answer instead of a list of links, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews.

SEO aims to rank a page in a list of search results so people click it. AEO aims to have an AI answer quote your page or name your brand, often without a click. They share foundations: an engine that searches the web can only cite pages it can crawl and index. They differ in what you measure (mentions and citations across a set of questions, instead of positions for keywords) and in the content work (a direct, quotable answer near the top of each section).

All three, because they depend on each other. SEO keeps your pages crawlable, indexed and findable, which AI engines rely on when they search the web. AEO and GEO add the work that decides whether an answer quotes or names you: clear answers on your own pages and a presence on the third-party sources engines cite.

Mostly. LLMO (large language model optimization) and AI search optimization are other names for the same practice. AI SEO is ambiguous: it also means using AI writing tools for classic SEO, which is a different thing. The terms differ in origin and audience, not in what you do.

Pick a fixed set of questions your buyers ask, ask each AI engine those questions on a schedule, and record for each answer whether your brand is named in the text and whether your pages are cited as sources. The share of answers that include you is your visibility rate; measured the same way for competitors over the same answers, it gives your AI share of voice. AI answers change from run to run, so a single reading can move when nothing changed. To tell whether a specific change worked, compare the prompts it affects against prompts it did not touch, over repeated runs.