AEO vs SEO vs GEO: what's actually different

If you already do SEO, most of what you know still counts. The difference is in what you're trying to win and how you can tell whether you won it.

The three terms

SEO, search engine optimization, is the work of earning a position in a search engine's list of results. Success is a ranking, and the reward is a click.

AEO, answer engine optimization, is the work of being named or cited in the answer an AI assistant writes: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Success is a mention or a citation inside the answer, and the person may never click at all.

GEO, generative engine optimization, is the name a 2023 research paper gave the same problem. In practice people use AEO and GEO for the same job, and the search data shows they ask about them the same way: "aeo vs geo" has about 1,900 US searches a month and "aeo vs seo" about 2,800 (Ahrefs, read 2026-11-12). Pick one name and move on; the work doesn't change.

What stays the same, what changes

What an SEO already has that counts

Assistants search before they answer. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use "query fan-out", issuing several related searches to build a response, and ChatGPT runs its own fan-out searches the same way. Pages that rank for those searches get read, and pages that get read get cited. So:

• Rankings feed answers. A page in the top results for the searches an assistant runs is a page it can cite.
• Clear, specific pages win twice. A page that answers one question in its first lines is both a good search result and an easy source to quote.
• Technical basics still apply. If a crawler can't read your page, neither a search engine nor an assistant can use it. Google's own guidance is that there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode" beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet.

What's new

The answer is the result, not the list. On all six AEO searches we checked on Google, an AI Overview sat above the links, citing pages that weren't always the top-ranked ones (the six searches). For "aeo vs seo", the Overview cited Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram posts beside articles from Semrush and others, while HubSpot's article ranked seventh. Being one of the cited pages matters more here than the blue-link position. (How Overviews differ from Google's conversational AI Mode is in AI Overviews vs AI Mode.)

Third-party pages carry more weight. When an assistant shops a category, it reads roundups, review sites and forum threads. Your own page can be excellent and still not be the page that decides who gets named. Part of AEO is getting onto other people's lists.

Answers vary, so you sample. A ranking is one number you can check. An answer changes from one ask to the next, so the honest measure is a rate: out of many answers to a question, how many name you. That needs several samples per question per assistant, and a noise band to tell a real change from chance.

Proof needs controls. In SEO you can usually see a page's ranking move after you change it. In AEO, a rise on your target questions means little unless the questions you didn't touch stayed flat. Our guide to getting named in ChatGPT walks through the controls and the day-21 and day-35 reads.

How to measure it

Track the questions buyers ask, not keywords. For each one, record:

• Named: the share of answers that name your brand.
• Named first: the share that name you before any rival, which matters most on buying questions.
• Cited: the share that link to one of your pages, which matters most on fact questions.

Weight buying questions above fact questions, compare against the top two or three rivals on the same questions, and read the trend by week with its noise band; our guide to measuring AI visibility goes through each step. Here's how that looks in Keats's weekly read, on Prepco, a made-up brand from our demo workspace:

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Named in buying answers, beside the rivals

So which do you need?

Both, and for most teams they share a budget and a person. Keep doing the SEO that earns rankings for your buyers' searches. Add the AEO layer: track the questions, read who gets named instead of you, fix the facts, improve the pages assistants already read, and work your way onto the lists they cite. Our AEO strategy lays that out as a 90-day plan.