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

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of ranking pages in search results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are two names for the work of being used in AI-written answers. There’s no official line between AEO and GEO, and Google says that for its own search, this work is “still SEO”.

The useful difference is the result you want, not the acronym: a ranked link, a cited page or a named brand. Each one needs different work and a different measure. We sell a tool in this category, so we have an interest in these terms seeming important. They matter less than the three results.

Where did the terms SEO, AEO and GEO come from?

SEO is the oldest of the three terms. AEO was in use by about 2018 for voice search and featured snippets, and GEO was named in a research paper first posted in November 2023. AEO and GEO were coined for different technology, which explains the two names, and both now get applied to tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews.

AEO’s origin isn’t settled. One history of the term gives its earliest verified use as a February 2018 Search Engine Watch article on voice search. It says the common credit to Jason Barnard for 2017 rests on his own company’s site and vendor content. We could read only a reposted copy of that article, not the original, so treat the date as approximate.

For the full explanation of the work itself, read our guide to what AEO is.

Is there an official difference between AEO and GEO?

No, there’s no official difference between AEO and GEO, and the companies that run the engines don’t agree with each other. Google treats both as SEO. Bing’s guidelines, as reported, use GEO. Microsoft Advertising gives them separate meanings. Vendors and agencies then draw the line in several different places, as the table shows.

We read these pages on 6 November 2026. None of the vendor or agency pages cites a source for where it draws the line between AEO and GEO. The GEO paper defines GEO, but not against AEO. A 2026 survey of GEO research doesn’t discuss the distinction either.

Our view: treat AEO and GEO as synonyms unless someone defines them for you. When a person or vendor says one differs from the other, ask what they’d do differently and how they’d measure it. If the answer is the same work, the difference is only a name.

What do you do differently for each result?

The work differs by result, not by acronym. A ranked link depends on crawling, relevance and links to your pages. A cited page depends on being found by the searches an AI assistant runs. A named brand depends largely on what other sites say about you. Most teams need all three, in that order, because each builds on the last.

What to do for a ranked link

SEO work stays the base for AI answers on Google. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible for a snippet to appear as a link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements. Ranking also goes with lasting citations. Ahrefs, which sells SEO tools, found in October 2026 that 29% of pages ranking in Google stayed cited for 7 or more days in AI Overviews, against 4% of pages that didn’t rank. On ChatGPT the figures were 11% and 4%. That covered 230 questions and is a correlation.

Ranking for the question as typed isn’t enough, though. In the same study, about 75% of AI Mode and ChatGPT citations came from pages that didn’t rank for that question. AI tools run their own searches, a step called query fan-out. So SEO still matters, but the target is a wider set of narrow queries than a keyword tool shows you.

What to do for a cited page

Being cited depends first on being retrieved by the assistant’s own searches. A University of Toronto preprint from October 2026 found ChatGPT cited 43.8% of pages ranked first in its own search and 3.5% of those ranked 11 to 20. That’s one correlational study of API models in narrow markets, and it isn’t peer reviewed.

Some on-page advice holds up less evenly than it sounds. Comparing pages on the same website, the preprint found a closely matching title went with 16.8% more citations per standard deviation on Gemini, and no reliable change on ChatGPT (−0.2%). One closely matching paragraph helped on both: 9.5% on ChatGPT and 7.8% on Gemini. The authors link the weak ChatGPT title result to its habit of rewriting questions. So write a clear title, and give each narrow question its own strong paragraph.

To find those questions, use real ones. Bing’s AI Performance report shows a sample of the phrases its AI used when retrieving your pages. The query fan-out tool suggests others. Then check access: OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot decides whether a site appears in ChatGPT’s search features, and our robots.txt guide covers the rest.

What to do for a named brand

Being named is mostly off-site work: earning accurate mentions on the pages assistants read, and correcting what’s wrong. It’s also the result that SEO habits serve least well. Semrush, which sells an AI visibility tool, found in June 2026 that brands were named in 18% of appearances on informational prompts and 43.3% on comparative ones, across 115 prompts. A glossary page may earn citations and few mentions.

We explain the evidence in how ChatGPT, Gemini and Google choose which brands to name. The practical work sits closer to PR and product marketing than to on-page editing: find the third-party pages that assistants cite in your category, and see whether you belong on them. Use the AI answer fact-check to compare what an answer says about you with your real facts.

What doesn’t change under the GEO or AEO label?

A new label doesn’t come with proven new tactics. Google says its AI search needs no special files, no special markup and no splitting of content into tiny pieces. That’s Google’s position for Google only. See our articles on llms.txt and schema for what’s known elsewhere.

The paper that named GEO reported gains of “up to 40%”, and vendors often quote that figure. It came from a lab benchmark using GPT-3.5-turbo and the top five Google results, and it mainly measured word share in the answer, not clicks or retrieval. A 2025 re-test on newer models in a simulated engine found significant improvement in 3 of 54 cases, and its authors found traditional SEO had a much larger effect. Neither tested organically retrieved pages on a live engine, but nobody should treat 40% as an expected gain.

Which term should your team use?

Your team should use whichever term its audience already knows, and name the result next to it. We use AEO on this site, but no evidence favours it over the other terms. We haven’t measured which term buyers search for more. The right choice depends on the situation:

• With senior leaders, skip the acronyms and say the result: “how often AI assistants name us”, or “how often they cite our pages”.
• With Google-focused work, call it SEO, as Google does, and keep it with your SEO lead.
• When buying a tool or an agency, ask them to define their term. Ask which engines they cover, which of the three results they measure and how they count.
• In public writing, use both AEO and GEO once, because readers arrive from either.

Our view on ownership: the SEO lead can own ranked links and cited pages, because the work and data overlap. Named-brand work usually needs PR or product marketing too. Microsoft’s guide also describes this as reaching beyond marketing, according to Search Engine Journal.

What can’t any of these labels promise?

None of these labels can promise a mention or a citation. Bing’s guidelines say GEO doesn’t guarantee citations, as SEO doesn’t guarantee rankings. We don’t know of strong evidence linking tracked AI mentions to revenue. A 2026 survey of GEO research, a preprint by one author, found no technique with a stable long-term effect on organic discovery across engines. An agency that sells GEO as separate from SEO may still do good work, but the label doesn’t show that it will.

How can you see which result you’re missing?

You can see which result you’re missing with free reports and some patient asking. Start with the data you already own, then check the answers by hand:

1. Open Search Console for clicks and impressions on your key pages. Its AI report, available to all sites since August 2026, shows impressions in Google’s AI features. It’s silent on clicks and queries, at least in Google’s announcement.
2. Run the AI crawler checker to confirm that AI search crawlers can reach your site.
3. Ask 20 buyer questions in ChatGPT, Gemini and Google, several times each. For each answer, note whether your page is cited and whether your name appears. The AI answer analyser can pull this from a pasted answer.
4. Read the pattern. Low rankings point to SEO work. Good rankings with few citations point to access or narrow questions. Citations without your name point to work on other sites.

Hand counts stop being reliable as questions pile up. Quotable, which we make, runs your questions on each engine on a schedule and reports named and cited as separate numbers. Ahrefs Brand Radar, Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit and Profound also measure AI visibility, so compare how each one counts.