AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what the acronyms actually mean
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Short answer: AEO is answer engine optimisation, GEO is generative engine optimisation, and in practice the two terms are used interchangeably for the same thing - getting your business mentioned in AI assistant answers. Neither is a separate discipline from SEO. They are SEO with a different destination, and most of the work is identical.
The three terms
SEO - search engine optimisation
The long-standing practice of getting pages to rank in search results. The goal is a click: appear in a list of ten blue links, and persuade someone to choose yours.
AEO - answer engine optimisation
Optimising to be the answerrather than a link in a list. Predates AI chat - it grew out of featured snippets, voice assistants and “position zero”. The goal is a mention: being the source quoted back to someone who asked a question.
GEO - generative engine optimisation
The newer term, specific to generative assistants: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers. Same objective as AEO, narrower target. You will also see AI SEO, LLM SEO and LLMO used for the same idea. The vocabulary has not settled, and you should not read much into which term someone uses.
What genuinely changes
- There is no results page to rank on.An assistant returns one composed answer. Being “position four” is meaningless - you are either in the answer or you are not.
- Queries are conversational and much longer.Not “roofer leeds” but “my flat roof leaks after heavy rain, who in Leeds fixes that and roughly what does it cost?”
- Extractability beats keyword density. The model needs to lift a clear statement of fact. Specifics get quoted; adjectives do not.
- Being talked about elsewhere matters more. Assistants synthesise across sources. What other people say about you carries weight your own homepage never will.
- You may get the mention without the visit. Someone can act on your information without ever loading your site, which changes what you can measure.
What does not change
This is the part the acronyms obscure. ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Gemini grounding all rely on web indexes. If a page is not crawlable, not indexed and not credible, it does not get retrieved - exactly as in ordinary SEO. Fast, accessible, well-structured pages with real information still win. Nobody needs to throw away their SEO and start again.
A practical way to think about it
Traditional SEO asks: how do I rank for this keyword? AEO and GEO ask: if someone asks this question out loud, what would make me the answer?
In practice that means:
- Build pages around questions, and answer them in the first paragraph rather than after 600 words of preamble.
- Publish checkable specifics - prices, coverage areas, timelines, materials, qualifications.
- Use real structure - genuine headings, lists, tables. Structure is how a machine finds the answer inside your page.
- Add structured data so the meaning is explicit rather than inferred.
- Earn third-party mentions. Nothing on your own domain substitutes for this.
How to measure it
Rank tracking does not apply - there is no rank. What you can measure is how often assistants mention you when asked about your category without your name in the question. That is exactly what our AI visibility test does, and the free checkup scores the on-page side under AI Search Readiness - see the full check list.
Is it worth a separate budget line?
Honestly: not yet, for most businesses. The overwhelming majority of the work - crawlable, fast, well-structured pages that answer real questions, plus a reputation beyond your own domain - is the same work that has always been worth doing. Treat AEO and GEO as a change of emphasis rather than a new department, and be sceptical of anyone selling them as a distinct service with guaranteed placements.