AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what's the difference?
AEO and GEO are two names for one job: getting AI answers to name and cite you. AEO is the older name, in print by 2018; GEO comes from a 2023 research paper. Both stand on SEO, and Google says that for its own AI features the work is still SEO. What changes is which crawlers must reach you, what counts as a win and how you count it.
Checked against the studies and help pages it cites on October 13, 2026.
Three names, in the order they arrived.
Each name was coined for the way answers reached people at the time: a list of links, then one spoken answer, then a reply an AI writes.
SEO, since the 1990s
Search engine optimization has carried that name since the 1990s.[1] Google's starter guide describes it as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it.[2]
AEO, in print by 2018
In February 2018, Search Engine Watch reported that optimizing for engines that give one answer, in a featured snippet or read out by a voice assistant, had come to be called AEO, answer engine optimization.[1]
GEO, from a 2023 paper
Six researchers introduced generative engine optimization in a paper posted in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024. It is about being visible in answers that an AI writes from several sources.[3] What is GEO? has the definition and what the paper found.
Two names, one job today
AEO began with snippets and voice, GEO with chat assistants. Google's own guide now treats them together, as two terms for work on visibility in AI search.[4]
What Google and Microsoft say.
Google and Microsoft both run a search engine and an AI assistant. They describe the same work in different words, and they agree on more than the words suggest.
Google: it is still SEO
Google's guide to its generative AI features says that, from Google Search's side, optimizing for AI search is optimizing for search, and so still SEO. Its reason: AI Overviews and AI Mode retrieve pages from the same index, through the same ranking systems, as the results page.[4]
Microsoft: SEO, then GEO on top
Microsoft Advertising wrote in January 2026 that SEO is how you won in search and GEO is how you win the recommendation, and that the goal moves from traffic to influence.[5] A month later it called GEO both the same as SEO and something new: traditional SEO stays essential because a site must rank well to be found, and GEO adds work on how content is phrased and formatted.[6]
Where they agree
Neither says to stop doing SEO. The 2018 article that described AEO said the same: it would not replace SEO.[1]
Where Google's answer stops
Google's guide speaks for Google Search. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity each fetch pages with crawlers of their own, so ranking in Google doesn't settle whether they can read you.[7, 8, 9]
What doesn't differ.
Most of the work is shared. If your SEO is sound, you have done the larger part of AEO and GEO already.
Pages a crawler can reach and index
To show as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. Google lists no technical requirement beyond that.[10]
Content with something of your own
Google says content that people find unique and useful will likely do more for your presence in AI search than anything else in its guide, and warns against pages that restate what others have said.[4]
No special files, for Google
Google's guide lists what you can skip for Google Search: llms.txt files, breaking pages into small chunks, rewriting pages for AI, and special structured data.[4] The llms.txt guide has the evidence on that file.
What actually differs in the work.
Four things change when the reader is an AI assistant and not a results page. This is the part of the work that the newer names stand for.
Which crawlers you let in
SEO watches Googlebot and Bingbot. ChatGPT search reads through OAI-SearchBot, Claude through Claude-SearchBot and Perplexity through PerplexityBot, and each has its own name in robots.txt.[7, 8, 9] The crawler guide says which to allow.
What counts as a win
SEO wins a position and the click it earns. In an AI answer the win is being named, being named first, or being cited as a source, and an answer can name you without sending a visitor.
How steady the result is
A ranking is one list you can look up. In SparkToro's study of 2,961 runs, the chance that ChatGPT or Google's AI gave the same list of brands twice was under 1 in 100.[11] Our guide on why ChatGPT's answers differ has the causes.
How you measure it
SEO reads rankings and clicks. Google now reports its AI features in Search Console too, in a Generative AI performance report, and adds that no third-party tool sees inside its ranking or AI systems.[4] For other assistants you ask the same questions many times and count the answers that name you. A tracker, ours included, counts what the answers say.
Which name to use, and where to start.
The label doesn't change the work. Pick the one your buyers use, then do the same three things.
Use either name
We say GEO, because it has a published definition, and treat AEO as the same job.[3] An agency that sells “AEO” and one that sells “GEO” should be judged on the work, which Google suggests checking against its advice on third-party SEO services.[4]
Check access first
The free GEO audit checks whether AI crawlers can reach and read your pages, and the robots.txt guide has rules to copy.
Then count answers
AI visibility tracking asks AI assistants your buyers' questions on a schedule and shows how often they name you. To check by hand, use the ChatGPT guide.
Questions about AEO, GEO and SEO.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice, yes. AEO, answer engine optimization, was the name for winning the single answer in voice search and featured snippets. GEO, generative engine optimization, was coined for answers that an AI writes. Both names are now used for getting AI answers to name and cite you.
Is GEO just SEO?
For Google Search, Google says so: its AI features draw on the same index and ranking systems, so optimizing for them is still SEO. Outside Google there is more to it. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity fetch pages with their own crawlers, and you count mentions, not positions.
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO aims at a position in a list of links and the click it earns. GEO aims at being named and cited inside an answer that an AI writes. The pages, the crawling and the quality of the content are shared. The crawlers, the win and the measuring differ.
Which came first, AEO or GEO?
AEO. Search Engine Watch described it in February 2018, tied to voice search. GEO comes from a research paper posted in November 2023.
Do I need separate SEO, AEO and GEO plans?
No. One plan covers all three: keep pages crawlable and indexed, let AI search crawlers in, publish content with something of your own in it, then count how often AI answers name you next to the rankings you already track. Run the free GEO audit
Where each fact comes from.
Each numbered source is the page a fact comes from: published studies and the AI companies' own help pages, read on October 13, 2026. The answers above repeat facts marked in the guide. Help pages change, so check them before you act.
- 1Search Engine Watch: The rise of Answer Engine Optimization: Why voice search matterssearchenginewatch.com/2018/02/07/the-rise-of-answer-engine-optimization-why-voice-search-matters/
- 2Google: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guidedevelopers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
- 3Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024: GEO: Generative Engine Optimizationarxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
- 4Google: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Searchdevelopers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/ai-optimization-guide
- 5Microsoft Advertising: From Discovery to Influence: A Guide to GEOabout.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post/january-2026/from-discovery-to-influence-a-guide-to-geo
- 6Microsoft Advertising: Understanding AI search: A guide for modern marketersabout.ads.microsoft.com/en/blog/post/february-2026/understanding-ai-search-a-guide-for-modern-marketers
- 7OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI Crawlersdevelopers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- 8Anthropic: Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler
- 9Perplexity: Perplexity Crawlersdocs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers
- 10Google: AI Features and Your Websitedevelopers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- 11SparkToro: NEW Research: AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products; marketers should take care when tracking AI visibilitysparktoro.com/blog/new-research-ais-are-highly-inconsistent-when-recommending-brands-or-products-marketers-should-take-care-when-tracking-ai-visibility/
Keep reading
- The free GEO auditA free GEO audit of up to 300 pages: AI crawler access, JavaScript rendering, 21 checks and fixes ranked by impact, with code. No sign-up.
- AI visibility tracking across six AI enginesTrack how often ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude name you, put you first and cite your site, with a 90% range on every rate.
- AI visibility tools, comparedEvery tool we have checked, by starting price.
- AEO and GEO tools, comparedTools that audit your site and track the answers.
- What is GEOGEO, generative engine optimization, in plain words: how AI answers pick their sources, what research shows helps, and how to measure your AI visibility.
- Check if ChatGPT mentions your brandCheck by hand in five steps, see why one chat can't measure it (answers change, memory, location, leading questions), and where ChatGPT and Claude do help.
- Find the competitors ChatGPT recommendsA method for finding who ChatGPT recommends instead of you: which questions to ask, how many times, how to count the names and work out your share of voice.
- Does ChatGPT give everyone the same answer?No. ChatGPT writes each answer afresh and can use your memory, location, a web search and your plan's model. OpenAI's own pages, and our repeat-run numbers.
- AI visibility metricsMention rate, first-pick rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment: what each one counts, how to work it out, and why each needs a range.
- Get ChatGPT to recommend your businessWhat gets a business named in ChatGPT's answers: what you control, whether you can submit your business, how long changes take, and how to measure it honestly.
- Get cited by ChatGPTHow ChatGPT search finds and picks the pages it links, from OpenAI's docs, what makes a page usable as a source, and which kinds of pages our data shows cited.
- Why ChatGPT doesn't show your websiteSix reasons ChatGPT leaves a site out, in the order to check them: robots.txt, firewalls, noindex, JavaScript, Bing's index and who the pages it reads name.
- Does ChatGPT use Google or Bing?What OpenAI documents about where ChatGPT search gets results (Bing, its own crawler and index), what is only reported about Google, and what it means for you.
- Rank in Google's AI OverviewsWhat Google says you need to show up in AI Overviews, how query fan-out and nosnippet work, and what studies show: 38% of cited pages rank in the top 10.
- Rank in Google AI ModeWhat sets Google's AI Mode apart from AI Overviews: query fan-out, follow-ups, a custom Gemini and Search Console's counts, and how often the two cite one page.
- Perplexity SEOHow Perplexity finds, reads and cites pages: its two crawlers, what its docs say and leave out, the Cloudflare dispute, studies, and what our runs show.
- Which AI crawlers to allowWhich AI crawlers feed ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's answers, which only train models, and what the 1,529 of 1,605 cited sites we could read allow.
- robots.txt for AI crawlersCopy-ready robots.txt rules that keep AI search crawlers in and training crawlers out, how each crawler reads the file, and the mistakes that lock AI out.
- What is llms.txt?llms.txt is a Markdown file that tells AI agents what a site holds. Its format, a real example, who reads it today, and what studies show about its effect.
- Firewalls that block AI crawlersCloudflare, Vercel, AWS WAF and others can turn AI crawlers away even when robots.txt lets them in. Where each setting lives and how to let crawlers through.
- Do AI crawlers render JavaScript?Google's and Bing's crawlers render JavaScript. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity don't say, and Vercel's 2024 study found theirs don't. Our data on cited pages.
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