GEO vs AEO vs AI SEO
Generative engine optimization, answer engine optimization, AI SEO, LLM SEO. Four names, one job: getting your product named when a buyer asks an AI assistant. Where the terms come from, what genuinely differs from classic SEO, and what to ask an agency before you sign.
Generative and answer engine optimization, explained
The short answer
GEO, AEO, AI SEO and LLM SEO all describe the same job: getting your product named, and ideally cited, when someone asks an AI assistant a question your buyers ask. The names come from different places and stress different things, but no agency does materially different work depending on which one it puts on the invoice.
If you are comparing proposals, ignore the label and read the scope. The useful questions are what gets measured, on which platforms, and what work happens off your own site.
Where each term comes from
| Term | Where it comes from | What it usually means today |
|---|---|---|
| GEO generative engine optimization | A 2023 research paper that tested how content changes affect visibility in AI-generated answers | Getting a brand named and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI features |
| AEO answer engine optimization | SEO practice from the late 2010s, aimed at featured snippets and voice assistants | The same goal as GEO, with more weight on direct answers and question-shaped content |
| AI SEO | Agency and tool marketing | Either GEO, or using AI tools to do ordinary SEO. Ask which |
| LLM SEO | Developer and SEO communities | GEO, phrased around the language models rather than the search products |
Generative engine optimization is the most specific of the four. The term was coined in a 2023 academic paper that treated AI answer engines as a new kind of search and measured which content changes made a source more likely to be used in the answer. Adding statistics, quotations and citations to sources helped; keyword stuffing did not. That framing, optimising for being used in a generated answer, is where the industry term comes from.
Answer engine optimization is older. SEOs used it for featured snippets, “People also ask” boxes and voice assistants that read out a single answer. When ChatGPT and AI Overviews arrived, the term was simply extended to them, which is why AEO advice still leans towards question-and-answer formatting.
AI SEO is the vaguest. Half the people using it mean GEO. The other half mean ordinary SEO done with AI tools: drafting content, clustering keywords, writing briefs. Both are legitimate, but they are different services, so when a proposal says AI SEO, ask which one is being sold.
LLM SEO is mostly a developer-community name for GEO. It puts the model at the centre, which is slightly misleading: for questions about current products, assistants answer from live web search rather than from what the model memorised.
What actually differs from classic SEO
The overlap is real: both need a page that a crawler can read and that says something useful. Beyond that, the two disciplines reward different things.
| Classic SEO | GEO / AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you appear | A ranked list of ten results | A paragraph naming three or four products |
| Unit that competes | The page | The passage a statement is lifted from |
| What counts as winning | Position and clicks | Being named, and how early in the answer |
| Main lever off your site | Links that pass authority | Presence on the pages the assistant reads |
| How it is measured | Rankings, traffic, conversions | Mention rate, citation rate, share of voice on a fixed query set |
| How fast it moves | Months | Weeks to first signal, months to a stable share |
The biggest practical difference is the fourth row of that table. In classic SEO, the main off-site lever is links. In AI answers, it is being present on the pages the assistant reads when it researches your category. In our study of 152 cited sources in ITSM software and proxy servers, not one sat on the named vendor’s own website; 90 percent of the ITSM sources were “best X” rankings published by someone else.
The second difference is the unit. A search engine ranks a page as a whole. An assistant lifts a paragraph, so a page with a direct answer, concrete numbers and a comparison table gives it something to quote, while a well-written page of positioning copy gives it nothing.
What stays the same
Most of the foundation is shared, which is why we run search and AI answers as one engagement rather than two.
Crawlability. A page that a search crawler cannot render is one an assistant cannot quote. JavaScript-only content, blocked bots and broken canonicals hurt both.
Demand mapping. The questions buyers type into Google and the ones they ask ChatGPT come from the same buying process. The phrasing is longer in AI, but the intent is the same, and the commercial questions are where the money is in both.
Third-party presence. The outreach list for a SaaS or B2B product and the list of pages an assistant cites overlap heavily. Good link building in a technical niche already puts you on many of them.
Honest comparison pages. They convert best in search and they are the page type AI answers are built from.
How GEO is measured
Any GEO or AEO proposal should come with a baseline, and the baseline should be specific enough to repeat. We use a fixed set of two hundred questions your buyers actually ask, run across four platforms, and report five numbers:
Brand mention rate, the share of answers that name you at all. Citation rate, the share that link to one of your pages. Competitor share of voice, how the mentions split between you and the vendors you are compared against. Most cited pages, which of your pages the models actually quote. And commercial prompt coverage, visibility on the questions a buyer asks when choosing a vendor rather than learning a concept.
The set stays fixed between measurements. Changing the sample every quarter produces a chart that shows a change in method, not a change in result, and it is the easiest way for an agency to report progress that did not happen.
How to choose a GEO or AI SEO agency
Five questions separate the agencies that do the work from the ones that renamed their content package.
What is the baseline, and will you re-run the same one? If there is no fixed query set, there is no way to know whether anything changed.
Which platforms, and do you report them separately? ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI features lean on different sources and move at different speeds. A single blended number hides that.
What work happens off our site? If the plan is only to rewrite your own pages, it leaves out the part that moves the answer most.
Do you promise rankings in ChatGPT? Answers change daily and differ by phrasing. A credible agency commits to scope, method and a measured share, not to a guaranteed position.
What does it cost on its own? For reference, we charge $800 a month for AI search as a standalone service, and include it in our $1,500 SEO and AI search plan. Prices are on our pricing page.
Questions about GEO and AEO
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