AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what is the difference?

Three terms, one set of goals

answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization describe optimizing for AI-generated answers. The second term was popularized by a 2023 academic paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, accepted to the KDD 2024 conference. In practice the two are used almost interchangeably.

SEO is the older discipline of earning visibility in search results. Today it also covers features such as AI Overviews, which draw on the same indexed pages.

Nobody owns these labels. In January 2026 Microsoft Advertising published a guide for retailers that reads AEO as "agentic engine optimization" (clarity through real-time product data) and GEO as building credibility so AI systems recommend you, according to Search Engine Journal’s breakdown. Another vendor will use the same letters differently. Ask what outcome is being sold, not which acronym.

What Google says about the labels

Google’s generative AI optimization guide (last updated July 2026) says AEO and GEO describe optimizing for the search experience, which Google considers SEO. It advises checking third-party AEO and GEO advice against its guidance on third-party SEO advice.

It also says generative features in Google Search rely on its core ranking and quality systems, using retrieval and query fan-out, and that foundational SEO practices still apply. See AI Overviews and AI Mode for how those features work.

That is Google describing Google. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot and others run their own retrieval, with their own crawlers. So we keep AEO as a distinct line of work even though most of the groundwork is shared.

What they share

• A site that can be crawled and indexed.
• Content that answers a real question clearly.
• Structured data and consistent facts, covered in schema markup for AI.
• Evidence of experience, expertise and trust, often summarized as E-E-A-T.

Where they differ

• Where you appear: a link in a list, or a name inside one answer.
• What wins: a page that ranks, or a passage an assistant can quote.
• How it is measured: positions and clicks, or share of answers.
• How content is written: around a keyword and a click, or around the questions behind a question.
• What counts as a signal: links and relevance for SEO, and also being mentioned and described consistently across the web for AEO, as covered in brand, entity and mentions.

What the evidence says about GEO tactics

The GEO paper tested nine content edits on a benchmark of queries and compared them with unedited pages. Adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources gave the largest gains, and the authors report improvements of up to 40 percent in visibility within generated answers. Stuffing keywords, the classic SEO tactic, performed worse than doing nothing.

The paper also found that results varied by topic, and that lower-ranked sources gained more than top-ranked ones from the same edits. The authors say they did not test effects on search rankings, and the main experiments used a single model as the answer engine. Use it as a hint about what makes content quotable, not as a forecast.

Google’s guide warns against the opposite error: chasing hacks. It says you do not need an llms.txt file, content chunking or a special writing style for Google’s AI features. The two views agree on one thing: specific, well-sourced writing beats padding.

Which should you do first?

If your technical foundation or core pages are weak, start with SEO, because assistants cannot cite pages they cannot reach. A good test: are your key pages indexed, fast and written to answer one question each? If not, fix that first.

If those are sound, add the AEO layer: question mapping, answer-first rewrites, entity consistency and measurement. Most of that work is editorial, and it improves pages for human readers as well.

We sell them as separate services because the goal and the way we measure are different, but we build one foundation under both.

How to tell which one is working

Keep two separate reports. For SEO: impressions, clicks, rankings for target pages and enquiries from organic search, from Google Search Console and your analytics. For AEO: the share of runs on a fixed set of buyer questions in which you are named or cited, tracked monthly. Details are in measuring AI visibility.

A rise in one does not prove a rise in the other. A page can rank well and still be skipped in an answer, or be cited without being the top result. Reporting both side by side is what stops the two disciplines from being confused.