GEO vs SEO vs AEO: what's different, and what a business owner should pay for
SEO, AEO, GEO, LLM SEO, AI SEO: five names, one customer asking a question. Where they overlap, where they differ, and how to tell whether you're buying something new or something renamed.
Every few months the industry invents a new acronym for helping customers find you. Right now there are at least five: SEO, AEO, GEO, AI SEO and LLM SEO. If you run a business, the useful question isn't which name is right. It's whether anything new is being sold, and what it's worth.
Here's how we see them, with the overlap measured where we can.
The short definitions
| Term | Stands for | Aims to | Where it shows |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Search engine optimization | Rank your pages | Google and Bing results, maps |
| AEO | Answer engine optimization | Be the answer that gets lifted | Featured snippets, voice, AI answers |
| GEO | Generative engine optimization | Be named and cited in AI-written answers | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, AI Overviews |
| AI SEO, LLM SEO | Same idea as GEO | Same as GEO | Same as GEO |
AEO is the oldest of the new ones. It grew out of featured snippets and voice search: write a direct answer high on the page so a machine can lift it. GEO came from a 2023 research paper and covers the newer case, where an AI writes a whole answer and cites a few sources. We wrote a fuller explainer of generative engine optimization.
How much they overlap
Mostly. Three things from our September 2026 citation study show it:
- Companies overlap a lot. 34% to 54% of the companies cited by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews also ranked in Google's top ten for the same question. Ranking is a big part of being named.
- Pages overlap a little. Only 2% to 12% of cited pages were in that top ten. Which of your pages gets quoted is the part SEO alone doesn't settle.
- The basics are shared. Every assistant we measured needs to fetch your page to cite it. Crawl access, readable text, fast pages and clear writing help all five acronyms at once.
What's new with GEO
Two things, and they're worth paying attention to:
1. AI crawler access. SEO has always checked Googlebot. GEO also has to check OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, and the firewall settings that block them. Plenty of sites that rank fine on Google are invisible to ChatGPT because of one robots.txt line. How to check yours.
2. Measuring the answers. Google gives you Search Console. AI assistants mostly don't give you anything comparable yet (Bing's new AI Performance report is the first real exception). So GEO has to measure answers directly, and because answers move a lot between runs, it has to repeat them. In our study, ChatGPT kept only 4.5% of its cited pages across three runs of the same question. How to track it.
Everything else sold as GEO, such as better content, structured data, digital PR and reviews, is SEO work with a new label. That doesn't make it worthless. It means you shouldn't pay twice for it.
How to tell new from renamed when you're buying
Ask a provider three questions:
- "How will you measure whether we're showing up in AI answers?" A good answer involves a fixed list of questions, several assistants and repeated runs. A weak answer is screenshots.
- "What will you do that our SEO work doesn't already cover?" A good answer names crawler access and answer tracking. A weak answer is "optimize for AI."
- "Do you guarantee placement in ChatGPT?" The right answer is no.
We put the full list in how to hire an AI SEO agency.
Which one should you pay for?
If you already have decent SEO, add the GEO pieces: an AI crawler check and a tracking routine. If you don't have decent SEO, start there, because it feeds everything else. The is SEO dead note explains why we're confident about that order.
Next steps
Run the free AI crawler check on your site. It covers the first new piece of GEO in ten seconds.
Our AI search optimization service bundles all of it, SEO and the GEO additions, for $1,000 a month with no contract: crawler access, tracking across four assistants with repeated runs, and the pages that get cited.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO aims to rank your pages in search results. GEO aims to get your business named and cited in AI-written answers. They share most of the work: AI assistants need to crawl your pages, and in our September 2026 study a third to half of the companies they cited also ranked in Google's top ten.
What is AEO?
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, means structuring content so a system can lift a direct answer from it, first for featured snippets and voice assistants, now for AI answers too. In practice it's a subset of SEO and GEO: put a direct answer first and back it up.
Do I need a separate GEO agency?
Usually not. Good SEO work already covers most of what GEO needs. The new parts are checking access for AI crawlers and measuring AI answers with repeated runs. Ask any provider how they measure, and what they do that your SEO doesn't.
