What Are GEO and AEO? How They Differ From SEO

What is GEO (generative engine optimization)?

GEO is the work of getting a generative AI to use your page as a source when it writes its answer.

Generative engine optimization is the set of practices that help AI answer engines cite your site. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Mode a question, the system retrieves pages, pulls passages and writes an answer with links to its sources. The goal of GEO isn't to rank first in a list: it is to be one of those sources.

The term comes from academia. A group of researchers led by Pranjal Aggarwal published “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” in November 2023, later accepted at KDD 2024. They proposed ways to measure a piece of content's visibility inside generated answers and reported gains of up to 40% in their experiments, with the caveat that results varied by domain. A useful starting point, not a guarantee for your industry.

What GEO adds is a change of unit. In SEO you count rankings and clicks. In GEO you count whether you are mentioned, whether you are linked and what the answer says about you.

What is AEO, and how is it different from GEO?

AEO focuses on supplying the exact answer; GEO on being a source for generated text. In practice they overlap almost entirely.

Answer engine optimization means shaping content so a system can use it as the direct answer to a question. The term predates generative AI, tied to Google's featured snippets and to voice assistants that read a single answer aloud. Its logic is question and answer: a heading that asks, a first sentence that answers, no detours.

The difference from GEO is one of emphasis. AEO thinks about the single answer, the one that fits in a box or a spoken sentence. GEO thinks about the text an AI assembles from several sources, where your page might contribute a fact, a definition or an example. Almost everything that helps one helps the other, and many practitioners use the terms interchangeably.

Google is blunter. Its May 2026 guide says AEO and GEO describe work focused on visibility in AI search experiences, and that from Google Search's perspective this is still SEO. It also advises evaluating any third-party advice or service sold under those labels against its official guidance.

SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO: do they compete or stack?

They stack: SEO gets the page indexed, AEO makes it quotable and GEO gets it into generated answers.

They don't compete. They are layers of the same job, and the bottom layer constrains the others: if your page can't be crawled or indexed, no AI will cite it, because Google requires pages to be indexed and eligible for a snippet, and ChatGPT needs its search crawler to have access. Here is how the three approaches compare:

What signals do ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google use to cite a source?

Access first, then relevance and quality; nobody publishes a closed list of factors.

No provider publishes a formula, so be skeptical of anyone selling “the 7 ChatGPT ranking factors”. What is documented is the first filter: access. Google explains that its AI features retrieve pages from its Search index using its core ranking and quality systems, a technique known as retrieval-augmented generation. OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler is what lets a site appear in ChatGPT search answers, and that blocking it keeps you out of them. Perplexity documents PerplexityBot for the same purpose in its results.

Past that filter, Google is explicit about what it values: unique, non-commodity content with first-hand experience, organized with clear headings, on a clean technical foundation. It also warns that spinning up pages for every variation of a question in order to manipulate generative answers violates its scaled content abuse policy.

One less technical signal shows up across every engine we test: consistency. If your website, your Google Business Profile and third-party listings disagree about your services or prices, the system has less reason to trust you. We cover engine-specific tactics for ChatGPT and Perplexity in our AI SEO guide; the principle here is enough: accessible, clear and consistent.

How do you measure GEO when there are no rankings?

With three sources together: Google AI impressions, visits from assistants and a fixed sample of prompts.

GEO is measured by combining partial data, because no single tool sees everything. For Google, Search Console added a Generative AI performance report in June 2026, rolled out to every site on August 31, 2026: it shows how often your pages appeared in AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country, device and date. It reports impressions, not clicks.

For external assistants, Google Analytics 4 added an AI Assistant channel in May 2026 that groups visits from ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and others. ChatGPT also appends utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends, according to its publisher documentation. Keep in mind that clicks from Google's own AI features don't land in that channel: they count as Organic Search.

The third source is manual, and it is the one most teams skip: a fixed list of 10 to 20 questions your customers genuinely ask, checked monthly in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Mode, logging whether you are cited and what is said. Tools that automate this sampling can save time, but Google warns that no third party has access to its internal ranking or AI systems, so treat their numbers as estimates.

Where should a business start?

With the basics done well, in this order, before paying for any service with a new acronym.

Most of the small and mid-sized companies we work with in Colombia don't have a GEO problem: they have a foundational SEO problem that AI simply makes more visible. Before hiring anyone, work through this list in order:

• Access: make sure robots.txt, your CDN and your host let Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot through.
• Indexing: confirm in Search Console that your service and product pages are in Google's index.
• Clear answers: one page per service stating what you do, for whom, where and from what reference price.
• First-hand experience: cases, processes and data from your own operation that aren't on a hundred other sites.
• Consistency: the same name, address, phone number and offer on your site, Google Business Profile, marketplaces and directories.
• Measurement: Search Console's Generative AI report and GA4's AI Assistant channel switched on from day one.
• Monthly sampling: your 10 key questions checked in the main assistants, with a log of who gets cited.