AEO vs GEO vs SEO: What's Actually Different (and What Isn't)

Published: 18 October 2026 | Last updated: 18 October 2026 | 17 min read

By Graeme Whiles

Somebody in your business has asked whether you need a GEO strategy.

Or an AEO strategy. Or both, on top of the SEO you already pay for.

It's a fair question, because most of what ranks for it will tell you that you need all three, run as three separate workstreams.

However, that isn't how any of this actually works.

AEO and GEO are two names for the same job.

And in 2026, Google published guidance saying that, as far as Google Search is concerned, that job is still SEO.

So here's the short answer before the long one.

SEO (search engine optimisation) earns your pages a place in search results so people click through to your site. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) both aim to get your brand cited, quoted or recommended inside the answer itself, whether that's a Google AI Overview or a ChatGPT response. AEO and GEO are the same work under different names. SEO is the foundation underneath both.

There are three places where they genuinely differ.

They just aren't the places most articles point to.

In this guide, I'll define all three terms properly, show you what Google itself now says about AEO and GEO, explain where the real differences sit, and give you one checklist and one set of KPIs that covers all three.

Short on time? Here are the key takeaways

• AEO and GEO are the same discipline: both mean getting your brand cited or recommended in AI-generated answers. The names come from different eras, not different work.
• Google calls it SEO: its 2026 guide to generative AI search says optimising for it "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."
• The real differences are access, outcome and reputation: which crawlers can reach you, whether a win is a click or a citation, and how much other sites' coverage of you counts.
• Measure presence as well as traffic: Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools both report AI visibility for free now, though neither gives you clicks.
• Be wary of a separate GEO retainer: llms.txt files, chunked content and AI-only rewriting all appear on Google's list of things you don't need to do.

What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?

First, let me explain what I mean by each term, because the definitions online drift a lot.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the work of earning visibility in traditional search results, mainly Google and Bing, so that people click through to your website from organic search.

It covers technical SEO, content, keyword research, internal linking and the backlinks and other authority signals that tell search engines a page deserves its position.

The unit is a ranking. The outcome is a visit.

What is AEO?

Answer engine optimisation (AEO) is the work of making your content the answer, or a cited source in the answer, when a search engine or AI assistant responds with direct answers instead of a list of links.

The questions behind it tend to be asked in natural language, often as conversational queries rather than two-word keywords.

That covers featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, voice search, and AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot.

The unit is a citation or a mention. Sometimes there's a click attached. Often there isn't.

What is GEO?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of getting your content referenced, cited and recommended in answers written by generative AI, meaning large language models (LLMs) that compose a response rather than return a list of links.

If that sounds like the definition of AEO, that's because it is.

One quick clarification. GEO here has nothing to do with geography.

Geo-targeting and local "geo SEO" are separate things entirely, which is one reason the acronym causes so much confusion.

AEO vs GEO vs SEO at a glance

Read the AEO and GEO columns side by side.

The only real gap between them is which surface gets the emphasis. The work underneath is identical.

Why there are three names for two jobs

SEO is the old one. The term dates back to the mid-1990s, when several early practitioners started using it at around the same time.

Search Engine Land's history of the term is worth a read if you like that sort of thing.

AEO grew up in the featured snippet era, when Google started answering questions directly on the results page and voice assistants like Alexa and Siri started reading those answers aloud.

GEO is the newest, and it has a specific origin: a November 2023 research paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", by Pranjal Aggarwal and five co-authors, later accepted to KDD 2024. It found that the right content changes "can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses."

Then, in May 2025, the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) published a thesis on how GEO rewrites the rules of search, and the term took off with investors and tool vendors.

Since then you'll also see AIO, LLMO, SXO and "search everywhere optimisation".

Most of these were named by somebody with something to sell (and yes, as an AEO consultant, I'm including myself in that).

Which raises the obvious question.

Is AEO the same as GEO?

For practical purposes, yes.

The most common way people separate them is by mechanism.

AEO gets framed as extraction, where a search engine lifts a passage from your page and shows it as the answer. GEO gets framed as synthesis, where a large language model reads several sources and writes something new.

That distinction is real at the level of the machine.

It just doesn't change what you do.

The page that gets pulled into a featured snippet and the page that gets cited in a ChatGPT answer share the same qualities.

It can be crawled, it answers the question plainly, it's credible, and other sources back it up.

Profound, one of the better-known AI visibility platforms, makes the same argument in its piece on why AEO and GEO are the same thing, and comes down on the side of AEO. I agree with them.

I use AEO for two reasons.

It describes the outcome you actually want, which is to be the answer. And it doesn't collide with geo-targeting, which matters more than you'd think when you're explaining the work to a finance director.

So from here on, when I say AEO, read it as AEO or GEO.

What Google actually says about AEO and GEO

This is the part most of the articles ranking for this topic were published too early to include.

In May 2026, Google published Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search, last updated in July. It addresses AEO and GEO by name, and its position is blunt: optimising for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO."

Its AI features documentation goes further: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary."

If a page is indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, it's eligible to be a supporting link.

The guide also has a section called "Mythbusting generative AI search", which lists what you don't need to do.

• llms.txt files: Google Search ignores them, so creating one will neither help nor harm your visibility in Google. I covered the Shopify side of this in llms.txt on Shopify.
• Chunking content: there's no requirement to break pages into tiny pieces for AI to understand them.
• Rewriting for AI: you don't need special phrasing, because Google's systems understand synonyms and general meaning.
• Manufactured mentions: chasing inauthentic mentions across the web is less useful than it looks, because the same spam systems feed the AI features.
• Special schema: structured data isn't required for generative AI search, though it's still worth using for rich result eligibility.

Now look at the "GEO tactics" sections on the pages ranking for this keyword.

There's a lot of overlap with that list.

However, notice the qualifier doing the heavy lifting in Google's guidance: as far as Google Search is concerned.

Google can speak for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

It can't speak for ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Microsoft Copilot, which run on their own crawlers, their own indexes and their own decisions about what to cite.

That's where the genuine differences live.

Where AEO, GEO and SEO genuinely differ

There are three places. None of them is about how you write.

1. Who can reach your pages

SEO needs Googlebot and Bingbot. AEO needs those, plus the crawler of every AI platform you want to appear in.

OpenAI is a good example.

Its crawler documentation explains that OAI-SearchBot is the bot that surfaces websites in ChatGPT search, and that sites which block it "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers". GPTBot is a separate crawler that collects content for model training.

The two are controlled independently, so you can allow search and block training if you want to.

The catch?

Crawler access is one of the first things I check in an AI visibility audit, because sites regularly block the very platforms they're trying to appear in. Usually it's a CDN bot setting nobody remembers switching on.

If you're not sure what yours allows, my free robots.txt generator and tester has presets for the main AI bots.

2. What counts as a win

In SEO, a ranking is only worth something if it earns the click.

However, in AEO, the answer often replaces the click.

Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 US adults through March 2025.

On searches where Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% where there was no summary. Links inside the summary itself were clicked in just 1% of visits.

Zoom out and it's starker. SparkToro's 2026 analysis of Similarweb's US panel found that 68.01% of Google searches in the first four months of 2026 ended without a click. Zero-click search isn't a trend any more. It's the majority.

So the win condition shifts from a visit to a presence. Did the answer name you, cite you or recommend you?

That needs different reporting, which I'll come to.

3. How much your reputation elsewhere counts

SEO has always cared about what other sites say about you, mostly in the form of backlinks.

AI answers lean on it harder, because a model writing an answer pulls from several sources at once.

Reviews, comparison pages, Reddit threads and press coverage all feed into whether AI models name you. Brand mentions are doing work that backlinks used to do on their own.

Query fan-out (where the AI runs several related searches behind the scenes to build one answer) makes this more pronounced. Ahrefs found that the share of AI Overview citations coming from the top 10 results for the original query fell from around 76% in July 2025 to 38% by March 2026, and pointed to fan-out as the likely cause.

In other words, ranking first for the head term no longer covers you on its own.

You need to show up across the subtopics around it, on your own site and on other people's.

I go deeper on how fan-out works in my guide to AI Overview optimisation.

Remember Google's warning, though. The mentions have to be real. Manufactured ones are on its list of things that don't work.

What AEO, GEO and SEO have in common

Here's the part that should save you money.

Strip out those three differences and everything else is shared. Google's guide says its AI features are "rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems", with answers grounded in pages from its index through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which simply means the model looks things up before it writes.

• Crawlable, indexable pages: if a search engine can't reach a page, neither can an answer engine.
• Content that answers the question: a clear content structure, a direct answer early that matches user intent, and the depth to back it up.
• Topical authority: covering a subject properly across a cluster of pages, which is exactly what query fan-out rewards. My guide to topical authority covers how to build it.
• E-E-A-T: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, or put plainly, a named author, first-hand evidence and sources that hold up.
• Clear entities: your brand, products and people described consistently, so search engines, Google's Knowledge Graph and AI systems don't confuse you with someone else. More on that in entity SEO.
• Technical health: fast, stable pages built on clean, semantic HTML.

That's most of the work.

It's also the work a good SEO programme should already be doing.

Connecteam is a good example from my own client work.

Organic traffic grew from 263K to 428K (+62.6%), and AI Overview visibility grew from 3,522 to 6,320 (+79.4%). Both came out of the same programme, not two. You can read how in the Connecteam case study.

Will AEO or GEO replace SEO?

No. And the reason is mechanical, not wishful.

AI answers are built on top of search.

Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode ground their answers in Google's index. ChatGPT relies on OAI-SearchBot to find the pages it cites in search answers.

Take away the indexable, credible, well-structured pages and there's nothing left to generate an answer from.

What's changing is the shape of a search result.

It used to be ten blue links. Now it's often a paragraph with a few sources attached, and sometimes a recommendation with no link at all.

SEO isn't being replaced. The results page it was built for is quietly being rebuilt around it.

Three Putt Golf, the store I built from a blank domain as a live proof of concept, went from zero to 1.18 million search impressions and into Google's AI Overviews on exactly these foundations. The Three Putt Golf case study shows the numbers.

How to measure SEO, AEO and GEO (the KPIs that matter)

This is the one area where you genuinely need new reporting, because the metrics that prove SEO is working can't see most of AEO.

SEO KPIs

• Visibility: keyword rankings, impressions and click-through rate in Google Search Console.
• Outcome: organic sessions and conversions in GA4.

AEO and GEO KPIs on Google and Bing

• Google: the generative AI performance report in Search Console shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country and device. Google rolled it out to all sites worldwide on 31 August 2026.
• Bing and Copilot: the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, live since February 2026, shows citation counts across Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, which pages were cited and the grounding queries the AI used.

Neither report gives you clicks. Treat them as presence data, not traffic data.

AEO and GEO KPIs on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude

• Share of voice across a fixed prompt set: run the same 10 to 20 prompts your buyers actually ask, once a month, and record whether you're mentioned, cited or recommended, and who appears instead.
• AI referral traffic: sessions in GA4 from referrers like chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. Small numbers for most sites, but they're real visits you can attribute.
• Branded search demand: when AI answers name you, more people search for you by name, and that shows up in Search Console.

If you want AI tools for the prompt tracking, I've ranked the best AI visibility tools honestly.

Before you buy one, read how to measure AI visibility without a tool.

One rule worth keeping: don't report a vendor's proprietary "AI visibility score" to your board.

You can't audit the formula, so you can't defend the number.

Which should you prioritise first?

It depends where you're losing.

• Your pages aren't indexed properly, or the site is slow and messy: fix the SEO first. Nothing gets cited from a page a crawler can't reach. My technical SEO audit checklist is a good place to start.
• You rank well, but clicks are falling: that's an AEO problem. Open the generative AI report in Search Console and check whether you're appearing in the answers that are taking your clicks.
• Your buyers research in ChatGPT before they ever reach Google: common in B2B SaaS and any considered purchase. Check AI crawler access first, then look at what the main AI platforms say about you and your competitors. My guide on how to rank in ChatGPT covers the detail.
• You're a local business: your Google Business Profile, reviews and consistent business details matter more than any acronym. Google's guide has a section specifically on local and ecommerce details.
• Someone is pitching you a separate GEO retainer: ask what they'll do that your SEO doesn't already cover. If the answer is llms.txt files, chunked content and AI rewrites, that's three items from Google's mythbusting list.

And if you run a small site with a handful of pages and a local customer base?

You don't need a GEO strategy. You need good SEO and a well-maintained Google Business Profile.

That isn't the answer that sells retainers. It is the right one.

One checklist for SEO, AEO and GEO

Because it's one job, it only needs one checklist.

Here's the version I'd start with.

• Open the door: allow Googlebot, Bingbot and OAI-SearchBot, and check your CDN isn't blocking AI crawlers you want to appear in.
• Answer first: put a direct 40 to 60 word answer under each question heading, then go deeper. That's for readers skimming, not for robots, which is exactly why it works everywhere.
• Cover the fan-out: map the subtopics and follow-up questions around your main term, and answer them across a cluster rather than one bloated page.
• Show your working: a named author, real credentials, first-hand examples and linked sources. My free E-E-A-T score checker flags what's missing.
• Be consistent about who you are: the same brand name, descriptions and product names everywhere. Organization schema makes that explicit, and my schema markup generator will build it for you.
• Earn real mentions: reviews, digital PR, expert commentary and genuine answers in the communities your buyers use. Never manufactured ones.
• Keep it current: update pages when the facts change, and only change the date when you've changed the content.
• Measure presence monthly: Search Console's generative AI report, Bing's AI Performance report and a fixed prompt set, compared month on month.

Want a quick read on where your pages stand? My free AEO readiness score checks most of the on-page items above in a couple of minutes.

Final Thoughts

AEO vs GEO vs SEO is mostly an argument about names.

Two of them describe the same thing. The third is the foundation both stand on.

Google says so for its own products, and the mechanics of every other AI platform point the same way.

The brands that show up in AI answers aren't the ones with a separate strategy for every acronym. They're the ones whose pages were already worth citing.

Where the work genuinely differs, in crawler access, in what you count as a win and in how much your reputation elsewhere matters, it's worth getting right.

Everything else is the SEO strategy you should be running anyway.

If you want to know where your brand stands across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot, that's what my AI Visibility Audit covers.

Crawler access, how the main AI platforms describe you, and where they place you against your competitors.

Get in touch, or email me directly.

Author Bio

Graeme Whiles is an independent SEO and AEO consultant at GWContent. He has worked with enterprise and SaaS brands, including Originality.ai, Connecteam, 6sense, Practice Better, and Peppr, growing organic traffic and AI search visibility across some of the most competitive categories in B2B. He also built Three Putt Golf Clothing from a blank domain as a live proof of concept for his methodology.

AEO vs GEO vs SEO Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?

SEO earns your pages rankings in search results so people click through to your site. AEO and GEO both aim to get your brand cited, quoted or recommended inside AI-generated answers, such as Google AI Overviews and ChatGPT responses. AEO and GEO describe the same work under two names, and both build on the same foundations as SEO: crawlable pages, useful content and credible authority.

Is AEO the same as GEO?

For practical purposes, yes. Some people separate them by mechanism, with AEO covering answers extracted from a page, like featured snippets, and GEO covering answers a large language model writes from several sources. The pages that win both share the same qualities, so the work is the same. I use AEO as the umbrella term because it describes the outcome and doesn't collide with geo-targeting.

Will GEO replace SEO?

No. AI answers are grounded in search indexes, so they depend on the same crawlable, credible pages SEO produces. Google's 2026 guidance on generative AI search says optimising for it is "still SEO". What's changing is the shape of the results page, with more answers and fewer clicks, which changes how you measure success rather than whether SEO matters.

What does GEO mean in SEO?

In this context, GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: getting your content cited in answers generated by AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. It has nothing to do with geography. Geo-targeting and local SEO are separate disciplines, which is why the acronym trips people up.

Do I need an llms.txt file for AEO or GEO?

Not for Google. Google's 2026 guide says Google Search ignores llms.txt files, so creating one neither helps nor harms your visibility there. If you want to influence which AI platforms can use your content, robots.txt rules for crawlers like OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot do far more.

What KPIs should I track for GEO vs SEO?

For SEO, track rankings, clicks and click-through rate in Search Console, and organic conversions in GA4. For AEO and GEO, track impressions in Search Console's generative AI performance report, citations in Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, share of voice across a fixed set of prompts, AI referral traffic in GA4 and branded search demand.

Can one page be optimised for SEO, AEO and GEO at the same time?

Yes, and it should be. A page that's crawlable, answers the question directly near the top, covers the topic in depth, shows who wrote it and why they know, and is backed up by other credible sources serves all three. There's no need for separate AI versions of your content.

Do backlinks still matter for AI search?

Yes. Google says its AI features are rooted in its core ranking systems, and links are still one of the signals those systems use. AI answers also weigh what other sites say about you more broadly, so reviews, press coverage and genuine mentions in communities matter alongside backlinks.