AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimization and GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. They are two different jobs, and neither of them is SEO. SEO gets a page onto the list of blue links. AEO gets your answer chosen as the one displayed above that list, in a featured snippet or read aloud by a voice assistant. GEO gets your business named inside the answer that ChatGPT, Perplexity or a Google AI Overview writes from scratch. Ranking first is no help at all if the AI answers the question and the person never scrolls.
The three are not the same work
It is tempting to treat these as three words for the same thing. They are not, and the work behind each one is genuinely different.
SEO is about a page competing against other pages for a position. The levers are the familiar ones: the site loads fast, the content matches what was searched for, other sites link to it.
AEO is about a passage competing to be quoted. Google is not ranking your page there, it is choosing one paragraph. That changes how you write. A short, direct, self contained answer near the top of a page wins those boxes. A long build up to a conclusion does not, because the conclusion is stranded three hundred words from the question.
GEO is about being in the model's answer at all. There is no list, no position, no click. Either your business is mentioned or it is invisible. What gets you mentioned is being a clearly defined entity that the model has seen described consistently in several places.
Why this started to matter
A growing share of searches now end without anyone clicking anything. The person asked, read the answer, and acted on it.
For a business, that is a different kind of loss from being outranked. Being outranked means you are on page two and somebody could still find you. Not being in the answer means you are not in the conversation, and there is no page two to be on.
The businesses being named in those answers are not always the biggest ones. Very often they are the ones whose information is easiest for a machine to read: a clear description, consistent details, questions answered plainly.
What actually gets you into an answer
Answer the question in the first two sentences. Not after an introduction about how important the topic is. Machines quote the part that answers the question, and if that part depends on the paragraph above it, it cannot be quoted.
Use structured data properly. Schema is how a page tells a machine what it is looking at rather than making it guess. An organisation with an address, a phone number, opening hours and coordinates is a fact a model can repeat. The same details buried in a paragraph are text it has to interpret.
Be consistent everywhere. If your business name, address and phone number are written three different ways across the web, a model has three candidates and confidence in none of them.
Publish real detail. Generic advice is already everywhere and adds nothing a model needs. Specific numbers, specific processes and specific local knowledge are the parts that get lifted.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Blocking the crawlers by accident.
A great many sites quietly refuse the AI crawlers, usually through a setting somebody turned on without reading it, or a security rule that returns an error to anything that is not a browser. The result is the same either way: the model cannot read the page, and a page that cannot be read is never cited.
Worth checking before anything else, because every other improvement is wasted if the door is shut. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for the crawler names. If they are disallowed, that is the first thing to fix.
How long it takes
AI citations often move faster than rankings, sometimes inside four to eight weeks, because schema and entity work can be picked up quickly.
Ranking movement in a competitive market still takes three to six months. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either guessing or quietly buying ads.
Questions people ask
- Is AEO just SEO with a new name?
- No. SEO competes for a position on a list of links. AEO competes to have one passage chosen and displayed above that list. The writing is different: an AEO answer has to make sense on its own, lifted out of the page, with nothing around it.
- Do I need GEO if my SEO is already working?
- If your customers are asking AI tools before they search, yes. Ranking first does not help when the answer appears above the results and the person never scrolls to your link. The two are worth doing together, because the structured data and clear writing that help one also help the other.
- Can I check whether AI mentions my business?
- Yes, and it costs nothing. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google the questions your customers would ask, such as a service followed by your city, and see which businesses get named. If you are not among them, you now know what you are working towards.
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