SEO, AEO and GEO in plain English

Agencies, tools and LinkedIn posts now throw around SEO, AEO and GEO as if they were three separate jobs. For a small business, they are mostly one job with a new twist. Here is a plain reading of each.

The short answer

• SEO is making your site easy to find and worth choosing in search engines.
• AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) are names for the same effort aimed at AI answers.
• Google says that, from its side, optimising for its AI features is still SEO. Most of the work overlaps. The new part is small, and worth a short list of its own.

What each term means

SEO, search engine optimisation. The older practice. You make pages that a search engine can read and index, and that deserve to rank for what people type. It covers technical basics, content and trust.

AEO, answer engine optimisation. A label people use for getting your content used in direct answers: featured snippets, voice answers, and now AI assistants. There is no official definition, and people use it in slightly different ways.

GEO, generative engine optimisation. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and co-authors, accepted to the KDD 2024 conference. The authors describe generative engines as search systems that use language models to gather and summarise information from several sources. They report that their methods raised visibility in such answers by up to 40%, and that the effect varies by subject area. That is a result on a benchmark the authors built. It is not a promise for your site.

What Google says

Google's guide to generative AI features uses the terms "answer engine optimization" and "generative engine optimization". It says that optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, and so still SEO. Its AI features are rooted in its core Search ranking and quality systems, and they highlight content from the Search index.

The guide advises you to:

• keep following ordinary good SEO practice;
• publish original, first-hand, helpful content;
• make sure your content is crawlable, and consider a Google Business Profile, which Google says can help your products and services be visible;
• check the Generative AI performance report in Search Console.

It also lists things you do not need: special AI files such as llms.txt (see does llms.txt do anything), breaking content into tiny pieces, or writing in a special way just for generative AI search. It points readers to its guidance on evaluating third-party SEO advice when they consider AEO or GEO services.

This is Google speaking about Google Search. Other assistants have their own crawlers and search tools, so we cannot say the same about all of them.

What overlaps

Most of the list is the same for all three.

• Pages that load, can be crawled and say clearly what you offer.
• Content written by someone who knows the subject.
• Accurate, consistent facts about your business across your site and other places.
• Mentions and reviews from sources that others trust.

What actually changes

A few things are different for AI assistants. These are the ones we think a small business should handle.

1. Let the right bots in. Each AI company runs separate bots for search, for training and for user requests. OpenAI, for example, says sites that block its search crawler will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Check yours with Check that AI search bots can reach your website.
2. Answer the question buyers actually ask. People often write whole sentences to an assistant, and they word the same need in many ways. In SparkToro's study, prompts written by people for the same headphone request had a semantic similarity of 0.081, which SparkToro compares to Kung Pao Chicken and Peanut Butter. See write buyer questions that matter.
3. Think in "how often", not "what rank". AI answers change from run to run, so a fixed position is not a stable thing. SparkToro's author says visibility measured over many runs is "a reasonable metric", and that any tool giving a "ranking position in AI" is "full of baloney". We cover this in AI answers change every time.
4. Check what the assistants say about you. They may repeat an old price or a wrong address, and fixing the source is often the way to correct it. The guide on fixing what AI gets wrong covers it.

A simple order of work

1. Make sure Google can find and index your pages.
2. Make sure the AI search bots are not blocked by accident.
3. Put your key facts (who, what, where, price range) on plain pages.
4. Ask the assistants a handful of buyer questions and note who they name.
5. Repeat in a month.

What this won't do

None of these steps guarantees that an AI assistant will recommend you. No one controls that. Anyone who sells a fixed ranking in AI answers is promising something the SparkToro study gives no reason to expect. The acronyms will also keep changing, and the basics under them change more slowly.