AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what’s the difference?

SEO, search engine optimisation, gets your pages ranking in search results. AEO, answer engine optimisation, gets your content quoted in direct answers, such as Google’s AI Overviews and voice answers. GEO, generative engine optimisation, gets your business cited and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude. In practice AEO and GEO are close to the same job, and both are built on SEO.

The names are new, but most of the work isn’t. Here’s how they differ, where they overlap, and what to change on a site that already does SEO well.

What we’re seeing

In October 2026, our Search Console started showing searches written like prompts, with a job title and a question attached, finding our journal posts. They look like searches AI tools make while they research an answer, which is GEO and SEO meeting in the same report.

The three side by side

	SEO	AEO	GEO
Aims for	A ranking in search results	Your answer quoted directly	Being cited or recommended in an AI-written answer
Where it shows	Google’s and Bing’s results pages	AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice assistants	ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Google’s AI Mode
What it rests on	Crawlable, fast pages that match what people search	The same, plus a direct answer to each question	The same, plus facts that are easy to quote and what others say about you
How you measure it	Rankings, clicks and Search Console	Featured answers and AI Overview appearances	Citations, mentions and visits from AI assistants

The terms overlap and are used loosely. Many people use AEO and GEO interchangeably.

SEO: the foundation

Search engine optimisation is everything that helps search engines find, understand and rank your pages: a site they can crawl, pages that load quickly, titles and headings that match what people search, structured data, and links from other sites. None of that stops mattering with AI search. AI assistants mostly cite pages that search engines can already find and trust.

Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode have “no additional requirements” beyond the normal requirements for appearing in Search (Google). So a site that’s weak on SEO is weak on AEO and GEO too.

AEO: being the answer

Answer engine optimisation is shaping a page so a search engine or assistant can lift a direct answer from it. In practice that means:

• The answer first. Open each page and each section with a two or three sentence answer, then explain.
• One question per section, with the question as the heading, worded the way people ask it.
• FAQs on the pages they belong to, marked up with structured data that matches the visible text. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in Search in May 2026 (Google), so the questions are there for readers and assistants, not for a special search feature.
• Specific, sourced facts: numbers, dates and names that are easy to quote and easy to check.

On client sites, Altus has FAQ markup on its three product pages, and Fresh Clinics stores more than 90 FAQs once in its CMS and shows each on the pages it belongs to. We’ve written up what we did on our own site in AEO: how to write pages AI assistants quote.

FAQs on an Altus product page, each question worded the way buyers ask it, with markup that matches the visible text.

GEO: being cited and recommended

Generative engine optimisation is the name researchers gave to improving how often content appears in AI-generated answers. The term comes from a 2023 research paper, which found that changing how content is written could raise its visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40% in the authors’ tests (Aggarwal et al.).

GEO goes a step beyond AEO in one way: being recommended depends on more than your own pages. When someone asks an assistant for the best options, it draws on what others say about you: reviews, directories, press, comparison posts and genuine discussion. A clear site helps you get cited for facts. A reputation outside your site is what gets you on the shortlist.

Is AEO part of GEO?

Mostly, they’re two names for overlapping work. AEO grew out of featured snippets and voice search, where the goal was a single quoted answer. GEO came with ChatGPT and Perplexity, where an answer is written from several sources. The habits that help one help the other, so there’s no need to run them as separate projects. “AI SEO” and LLM optimisation are other names for the same work.

What actually changes on your site

If your SEO is sound, the additions are small:

1. Rewrite openings to answer first, on service pages and posts, not just FAQs.
2. Add the questions buyers ask, in their words. Google’s People also ask box and your sales calls are the best sources.
3. Make facts quotable: specific numbers with dates and sources, rather than “leading” and “best in class”.
4. Check AI crawlers can reach you. robots.txt or a firewall can block AI search crawlers without you knowing; our robots.txt checker tests both. Search and training are separate: OpenAI’s OAI-SearchBot and Anthropic’s Claude-SearchBot fetch pages for search answers, while GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended relate to training, so a site can block training and stay visible in AI search (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google).
5. Build mentions off your site: reviews, directory listings and work that clients link to.

How to tell if it’s working

No single tool shows all three, so we look at a few:

• Search Console for rankings and clicks. AI Overviews and AI Mode count towards its Performance report (Google), and its Generative AI report shows which pages appear in them. How to see if AI Overviews cite you has the steps.
• Visits from AI assistants in analytics. Ours records each visit that arrives from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. It undercounts, because some apps don’t pass on where a visitor came from.
• A fixed set of questions, asked in the assistants your buyers use every month, recording whether you’re cited, mentioned or recommended.

To see how AI assistants answer your buyers’ questions today, try our free AI visibility checker.

Questions we get asked

What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?

SEO gets your pages ranking in search results. AEO gets your content quoted as a direct answer, such as in Google’s AI Overviews. GEO gets your business cited and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity. They share the same foundation, and AEO and GEO are often used as two names for the same work.

Do you still need SEO for AI search?

Yes. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode need nothing beyond the normal requirements for Search, and AI assistants mostly cite pages search engines can already find and trust. SEO is the foundation; AEO and GEO add answer-first content and outside mentions on top.

If you’d like your site set up for all three, see our SEO, AEO and AI search service, or tell us about your site.

Sources

• Google Search Central, AI features and your website
• Google Search Central, Documentation updates: the FAQ rich result deprecation (May 2026)
• Google, Google’s common crawlers
• OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers
• Anthropic, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web?
• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (arXiv, 2023)
• AEO: how to write pages AI assistants quote