AEO vs GEO vs SEO: What Is the Difference?

Type "aeo vs geo" into Google and it offers to finish the thought for you: "vs seo", "vs seo vs aio", "vs llmo". The acronyms are multiplying faster than the practices behind them. Here is what each one means, where they differ, and what we saw when we measured our own site.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the work of making pages easy for search engines to crawl, understand and rank, so they show up when people search for what you do. Technical health, content that answers real searches, and links from other sites are the three parts that have mattered for twenty years, and they still decide whether anything below this heading works.

What is AEO?

Answer engine optimisation is writing and structuring a page so that a search engine or assistant can lift part of it as the direct answer. That means featured snippets, voice answers and the short answers now built into search. In practice: answer the question in the first two or three sentences, use the searcher's own question as the heading, define terms plainly, and make the answer make sense out of context.

What is GEO?

Generative engine optimisation is making content more likely to be used and cited when an AI system writes an answer from several sources, as ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews do. The term comes from a paper published at KDD 2024, which describes generative engines as systems that "synthesize information from multiple sources and summarize them using LLMs". In the authors' tests, GEO methods could "boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses" (Aggarwal and others, arXiv 2311.09735).

How are AEO, GEO and SEO different?

They differ in what counts as winning:

SEO wins when your page ranks and someone clicks it.
AEO wins when your words become the answer, often with no click at all.
GEO wins when an AI answer names or links you as a source.

They share almost everything else. Each one rewards the page that answers a real question most clearly, from a source that can be trusted, on a site the engine can read.

Is GEO replacing SEO?

No. GEO depends on it. Google's own guidance says "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary", and that a page must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet" to appear as a supporting link (Google Search Central). OpenAI says sites that block its OAI-SearchBot crawler "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI). In both cases, the first step is being crawlable and indexable, which is SEO.

What changes is the reward. Google says links inside AI Overviews "get more clicks than if the page had appeared as a traditional web listing for that query" (Google, May 2024). If that holds for your pages, being the cited source matters more than being the tenth blue link.

What does this look like on a real site?

On 29 September 2026 we asked four AI engines (Google's AI Overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Bing Copilot) 12 questions a buyer might ask, and recorded every source they cited. The questions that named The Morning Beer got cited 8 times out of 8. The questions that didn't name us got cited once in 38 answers. That one was Bing Copilot recommending our Boring Marketing Detector as a free tool that checks whether copy is boring.

What we changed is ordinary SEO and AEO. A few hours before the run, too late for the engines to have seen it: one H1 per page, FAQ answers present in the page's HTML instead of hidden in closed panels, and structured data that ties the company, the founder and each page together. In the days after: service pages that open with a direct answer, and free tools that run on the page. The next measurement is due around 29 October. We will publish the numbers whichever way they go, in How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT.

Does llms.txt help?

Probably not yet. llms.txt is a proposal, made by Jeremy Howard in September 2024, "to standardise on using an /llms.txt file to provide information to help agents use a website" (llmstxt.org). Google's guidance says you don't need to create "new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" to appear in its AI features. We keep one because it takes ten minutes to write. We don't expect it to move citations.

What should you do first?

In this order:

Check that search engines can reach and index your key pages, and that your robots.txt doesn't block OAI-SearchBot, Bingbot or Googlebot.
Open every important page with a two- or three-sentence answer to the question it exists for.
Name your sources, and link them in the sentence that uses them.
Describe your business the same way everywhere: your site, your LinkedIn page, directories, your schema.
Pick ten questions your buyers ask, put them to the engines every month, and write down who gets cited.

Questions

Is AEO the same as GEO?

They overlap. AEO is about being the answer; GEO is about being cited inside an answer an AI writes. Most of the work, clear answers from a trustworthy source, serves both. The difference is what you measure: featured answers for AEO, citations in AI responses for GEO.

Do I need a GEO agency?

You need someone who does SEO properly and measures AI answers. The label matters less than the method: ask any agency which questions it will track, in which engines, and how often it will show you the citations.

How do you measure GEO?

Choose the questions your buyers ask, put them to each engine on a fixed schedule, preferably signed out, and record whether you are mentioned, whether you are cited, and who is cited instead. Compare month to month; one run tells you very little.

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