SEO vs AEO vs GEO, in Plain Words

SEO, AEO and GEO are three labels for overlapping work. SEO (search engine optimization) aims to rank your pages in a list of search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) aims to have your content supply the direct answer to a question. GEO (generative engine optimization) aims to have your content used and cited inside an answer that a generative AI writes. The labels differ. Most of the work underneath them does not.

What is SEO?

SEO is the practice of making pages easy for search engines to crawl, understand and rank, so they appear in results when people search. It covers technical health, content that matches what people search for, and links from other sites. The success measure is traditionally a position in a list of results and the clicks that follow.

What is AEO?

AEO, answer engine optimization, is an informal label for optimizing content to be chosen as the direct answer to a question. Definitions vary between vendors, and we found no official one, so treat it as a loose term. Think of it as SEO for questions that expect one answer.

What is GEO?

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the practice of improving how often and how prominently your content appears in answers that generative AI systems write. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, accepted to KDD 2024, which tested nine ways of rewriting content and found that adding citations, statistics and quotations helped most, while keyword stuffing did not. Our guide What is GEO? goes deeper.

What about “AI SEO”?

“AI SEO” is a catch-all phrase; we found no formal definition. People use it for SEO aimed at AI-powered search, which means it covers the same ground as AEO and GEO. If it shows up in a sales pitch, ask which tasks it actually includes.

How do SEO, AEO and GEO compare?

	SEO	AEO	GEO
Main goal	Rank in a list of results	Be the direct answer	Be cited in an AI-written answer
Where you appear	Search results page	Direct answers to questions	Inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and AI Overviews answers
Typical success signal	Position and clicks	Being selected as the answer	Being named or linked as a source
Origin of the term	Long-standing industry practice	Informal industry label	2023 research paper

What do they have in common?

Most of the foundations are shared:

• Crawlability and indexing. Google states that to appear in its AI features a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet.
• Clear, useful content that answers a real question.
• Sound site structure and internal links.
• Trust. Accurate claims, with sources.

Google also says SEO best practices remain relevant for AI features and that there is no special markup or AI text file required to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. That is the best argument against running them as three separate projects.

Where do they differ?

• There are more access rules. AI assistants use their own crawlers. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and GPTBot for training, controlled separately in robots.txt. A robots.txt rule written with Google in mind can shut you out of another engine.
• The unit of success changes. A ranking is a position on a page. A citation is a mention inside a sentence you did not write, and it may not bring a click.
• Measurement is immature. There is no universal AI visibility metric. The GEO paper used its own measures, and tools differ.
• Some tactics reverse. In the paper’s tests, keyword stuffing, an old SEO move, offered little to no improvement in generative answers.

What should you do first?

1. Check access. Review robots.txt for the crawlers of the engines you care about, and decide on search bots and training bots separately.
2. Fix indexability. Key pages should be indexable, with normal status codes and a sitemap.
3. Put the answer first. Open each page with a plain two-to-three sentence answer to its main question.
4. Add evidence. Real sources, figures and quotations, never invented ones.
5. Cover related questions on the topic, since Google says its AI features may run several related searches across subtopics.
6. Consider an llms.txt file as a cheap extra, knowing its effect is unproven. See our llms.txt guide.

How can you see your site’s position?

A GraphoRank scan crawls your site and scores its readiness for AI answers, with checks for llms.txt, sitemap, AI crawlability and answerability, next to classic SEO signals. How it works explains the steps, the GEO glossary defines the terms used here, and Pricing lists the plans. You can start with a free scan of up to 10 pages, no credit card needed.