AEO, GEO and SEO: What Actually Changed and What Did Not

SEO is the work of being findable in a list of results. AEO, answer engine optimization, is the work of being the answer a machine gives instead of that list. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the work of being cited inside a generated response. The three overlap so heavily that treating them as separate disciplines will cost you more than it earns, and the part that genuinely is new is smaller than the vocabulary suggests.

I want to be useful rather than contrarian here, so I will do both halves. First what each term actually means, including where GEO came from, which almost nobody writing about it mentions. Then the part that really has changed, which is real and which I am not going to talk you out of.

What do AEO, GEO and SEO actually stand for?

They stand for search engine optimization, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization. The difference between them is the shape of the thing you are trying to appear in, not the work you do to get there.

Read down the last two rows and you will notice the surfaces are not cleanly separated either. An AI Overview is an answer and it is generated. A featured snippet is an answer and it is not generated. These terms were coined by different people solving different problems, not by a standards body dividing up territory.

Does GEO mean geographic SEO?

No, though this is a genuinely confusing collision and you should know about it before you buy anything. In this context GEO stands for generative engine optimization and has nothing to do with location.

For about fifteen years “geo” in a search conversation meant geography: geo-targeting, geo-modifiers, the local pack. That usage has not gone away. So when a query like “geo seo” turns up in a keyword tool with healthy volume, some of the people behind it want to rank a plumber in one city and some of them want to be quoted by an AI assistant, and the tool cannot tell you which.

If somebody offers to sell you GEO, ask which one they mean before you get to the price. If you were searching and you meant location, what you want is local SEO, and none of the rest of this applies to you.

Where did the term GEO come from?

An academic paper, which is unusual for a marketing acronym and worth knowing because it gives the term a definition you can check. GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, introduced it as a framework for improving content visibility in generative engine responses.

The paper reports that its methods “can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses”. That figure gets quoted a great deal, usually with both qualifiers removed. It is up to 40%, measured on the researchers’ own benchmark, using specific content changes they describe. It is not a promise that a given tactic moves a given brand by 40%.

The origin matters because it separates two things that get sold together. There is GEO the research idea, a legitimate line of work with published methods you can read. And there is GEO the service line, which sometimes means the research and sometimes means an ordinary SEO audit with the cover page changed.

Is AEO different from SEO?

Not as a body of work, no. The things that make you a good answer are the things that already made you a good result: being accurate, being specific, and being organised so a machine can tell which passage answers which question.

The clearest evidence is that the engine most people are optimising for says so itself. Google’s guidance on generative AI features states plainly that “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add”, and that creating content people find useful “will likely influence your website’s presence in generative AI search in the long run more than any of the other suggestions in this guide”.

That is not what a new discipline sounds like. A new discipline arrives with a new technical requirement. This one arrived with a memo saying the requirement has not changed.

So are these three separate disciplines?

Mostly not, and I say that having watched the same sequence run before. A new surface appears, it gets an acronym, service lines are built on the acronym, and then the surface becomes ordinary and the acronym quietly stops being used.

I started in SEO in November 2010, on Citibank, Taj Hotels and Tata Motors, and mobile is the cleanest case I have lived through. Google announced a ranking change favouring mobile-friendly pages, effective 21 April 2015. For the next few years mobile SEO was a discipline. It had its own audits, its own checklists, its own line on a rate card and its own conference talks explaining why it was not the same as ordinary SEO. Then Google moved the whole index onto mobile-first crawling and announced it had landed in October 2023.

Mobile SEO did not fade because it was wrong. It faded because it won completely. Once every page is crawled as a phone sees it, optimising for mobile is simply optimising, and nobody can charge separately for doing the normal thing. The same pattern ran through structured data and through page speed, each sold for a while as the secret and each settling into table stakes.

My honest expectation is that AEO and GEO follow it. Not this year, and not before a good deal of money changes hands over the acronyms, but eventually. The reason to learn the words is that other people use them, not that they describe separate crafts.

What genuinely is different this time?

Two things, and both are about measurement rather than about the writing. You are competing for inclusion in one composed answer rather than for a position in a list, and you cannot see the result in the tools you already have.

The first changes the shape of the prize. A ranked list has ten places and a written answer has room for two or three sources, so the drop from being cited to being invisible is far steeper than the drop from position three to position six. There is no long tail of consolation traffic underneath an answer.

The second is the practical one. Google folds AI feature appearances into ordinary Search Console web search data rather than reporting them separately, so the surface taking your clicks and the surface that used to give them to you arrive as a single number. If you want to know whether any of this is working you have to measure it deliberately, which is the whole argument of LLM visibility and how to measure it.

The last row is the one to take away. What changed is the arithmetic of who wins and how you see it, not the work that makes you worth citing.

What should you do differently?

Very little to the writing and quite a lot to what you measure. Keep doing the work that made pages worth ranking, and add a measurement loop for a surface that reports nothing to you on its own.

The one structural habit worth adopting is the one this article is written in. Put the reader’s question in the heading and answer it completely in the first two sentences underneath, then explain. Not because a model rewards the format for its own sake, but because a passage that answers a question on its own can be quoted without dragging the surrounding paragraph along with it. Make it easy to lift and it gets lifted.

For the actions themselves I would rather point you somewhere than repeat them. The list of what still matters, and what I would stop spending time on, is in how to win in SEO in the age of AI. Nothing in it needed rewriting when the acronyms arrived, which is somewhat the point.

How do you know if any of it is working?

You count. Put a fixed list of buyer questions to the assistants, record whether you appear, and repeat it on the same schedule. That takes an afternoon the first time and is written up step by step as how to run an AI visibility audit.

Do it before you buy anything. I ran it on my own site and scored zero on every search, which I published with the raw numbers rather than describing in the abstract. A zero is a perfectly good place to start from, because it cannot be argued with.

If you would rather see the competitive half of the picture in one pass, Vantage compares your site against up to three rivals and includes how each brand shows up inside AI answers, returning a graded report in about thirty minutes. The findings are AI created, so read them with your own judgement before acting on them. The first analysis is free, which is enough to get your own number without committing to anything.

Whatever the discipline ends up being called, the sequence is the one it has always been. Find out where you stand, decide what you are trying to move, then do the work. The acronyms will keep changing. That part has not.