AEO vs GEO vs SEO: the terms explained, and where they overlap

AEO vs GEO comes down to emphasis. Answer engine optimisation (AEO) aims to make your content the direct answer to a question; generative engine optimisation (GEO) aims to have your brand named, recommended and cited inside answers that AI writes. Search engine optimisation (SEO) aims to rank your pages in a list of results. All three rest on the same foundations.

Agencies and software vendors use these terms loosely, and often for the same service. GEO has a traceable origin, in a 2023 research paper. This guide gives a working definition of each, shows where they overlap, and suggests how a South African marketing team should talk about the work.

In short

• SEO earns a ranking and a click in a list of results.
• AEO earns the direct answer: a featured answer in search, a spoken reply, or the sentence an assistant quotes.
• GEO earns a mention, a recommendation and a citation inside an AI-written answer, across several engines.
• The foundations are shared. Google says its AI features need no special optimisation beyond SEO best practice.
• What differs is measurement. Rankings do not tell you what ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude say about you.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the work of helping your pages rank in search engines' ordinary results. It covers technical health (can the page be crawled and indexed?), relevance (does it answer the search?) and authority (do other sites refer to it?). Success is measured in rankings, impressions and clicks, usually in Google Search Console.

What is AEO?

Answer engine optimisation is an industry term without a formal definition. In practice it means structuring content so a system can lift a direct answer from it: a short definition near the top, a clear question as a heading, a self-contained answer below it, an FAQ, and structured data that matches the visible text. The "answer engine" can be a search feature that shows an answer box, a voice assistant, or an AI chat tool.

AEO is best understood as a technique for writing pages, not a separate channel. It serves SEO and GEO at once.

What is GEO?

Generative engine optimisation is the work of making your brand more likely to be named, recommended and cited when an AI system writes an answer, in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews.

The term comes from GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, a paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues first posted in November 2023 and accepted to the KDD 2024 conference. The authors reported that some changes to a page raised its visibility in generative engine answers by up to 40%. Adding quotations from relevant sources lifted their visibility score from 19.5 to 27.8, and adding statistics to 25.9, while keyword stuffing lowered it to 17.8. Results varied by subject. Our guide to generative engine optimisation covers the paper in more detail.

You will also see LLMO (large language model optimisation) and AI SEO. Both usually mean the same work as GEO. Note that "AIO" is ambiguous: some people use it for AI optimisation, others for Google's AI Overviews.

AEO vs GEO vs SEO: side by side

	SEO	AEO	GEO
Aim	Rank a page in a list of results	Be the direct answer to a question	Be named, recommended and cited in AI-written answers
Where it shows	Google and Bing results pages	Answer boxes, voice replies, quoted answers	ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode
Unit of success	A position and a click	An extracted answer	A mention, a first mention, a cited source
Main levers	Technical health, relevance, links	Page structure: definition first, question headings, FAQs	All of the SEO and AEO levers, plus quotable facts, presence on cited sites and consistent facts about your brand
Where the answer comes from	The search engine's index	The page itself	Live search results and, for some engines, what the model learned in training
How you measure it	Search Console: rankings, impressions, clicks	Whether your text is the answer shown	Presence, first position, share of voice and cited sources, per engine

Where do AEO, GEO and SEO overlap?

More than vendors suggest. Google's own documentation says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI Overviews and AI Mode, that there are no additional requirements to appear in them, and that you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema.org markup. To be a supporting link, a page must simply be indexed and eligible to show a snippet.

The South African data points the same way. In our analysis of 96 Google South Africa searches on 11 October 2026, 92 showed an AI Overview. In 73 of the 86 Overviews that listed sources, at least one cited site also ranked in the top five ordinary results. In this sample, ranking well and being cited went together.

The shared work, in order of importance:

1. Crawlable, indexable pages whose content is in the HTML, not built by scripts after the page loads.
2. The answer first: a one-sentence answer or definition, then the detail.
3. Specific facts: prices in rand, dates, conditions, comparisons, sources.
4. Structure: question headings, tables, FAQs and structured data that matches the visible text.
5. Authority: other credible sites that describe and link to you.

Where do they differ?

• Measurement. SEO has Search Console. AEO and GEO need you to look at the answers themselves, on each engine, more than once.
• Number of engines. SEO work usually targets one or two search engines. GEO covers several assistants that can each answer the same question differently.
• Training memory. Some AI answers draw on what a model learned before its cut-off date, which no amount of on-page work changes quickly. SEO has no equivalent.
• Description, not just position. An AI answer can name you and describe you wrongly. GEO tracks what is said, not only whether you appear. See SEO vs GEO for a fuller comparison.

Which term should your team use?

Our recommendation: plan one programme with two scoreboards. Call the programme whatever your stakeholders already understand, SEO or GEO, and treat AEO as the writing technique that serves both. Then report two things every month: your search rankings, and your presence, first position and share of voice in AI answers on a fixed set of buyer questions.

What matters is not the label but whether anyone is measuring what AI tells your buyers. If nobody is, start there. Our guide to what Google AI Overviews are and how they choose sources is a practical next step.