What is GEO and how does it differ from SEO and AEO?

What is GEO in SEO?

Classic SEO competes for a position in a list of links. GEO competes for something else: a place inside the answer. When a generative engine responds, it does not show ten options; it reads several sources, writes a piece of text and decides whom to link to or name. If you are not in that text, you do not exist for that user, even if your page ranks well further down.

That is why anyone asking ‘what is GEO in SEO?’ usually wants to know whether the two are the same thing. They are not, but they do not work separately either: GEO is a layer on top of SEO, not a replacement, which is why you will also see it called GEO SEO. Google makes this clear in its documentation on AI features: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; the page simply has to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.

What is AEO (answer engine optimisation)?

Once you have the answer to ‘what is GEO’, AEO is easiest to understand by contrast. Answer engine optimisation means optimising your content so that a search engine extracts it as a direct answer: Google’s featured snippet, the People Also Ask box, a voice assistant’s reply or the opening paragraph of an AI answer.

AEO predates generative AI, having grown up with featured snippets and voice assistants, and its logic is unchanged: the search engine looks for a passage that answers a specific question in a few lines, without anyone needing to read the rest of the page. So its tools are about form: a definition in the first sentence, headings that are real questions, lists, tables and paragraphs that stand on their own. That is also why AEO and SEO are so closely linked: a search engine only extracts answers from pages it has already crawled and indexed.

The difference from GEO is one of scope. AEO makes you extractable; GEO aims to get the model to choose you, from among several extractable sources, and cite you. That also depends on your authority, on the data you bring and on what other sites say about you. In practice, AEO is the hinge between the two worlds: whatever helps you win a featured snippet usually helps you get cited by an AI.

GEO vs SEO: how do they differ, and where does AEO fit in?

The GEO vs SEO comparison, with AEO in the middle, comes down to three differences: where you appear, what counts as success and how it is measured. All three disciplines share the same technical foundations: if a search engine cannot crawl and index your page, none of them works.

These timeframes are indicative, based on practice rather than any standard: they depend on the sector, the competition and the authority you start with. And one conclusion holds for any SEO vs GEO comparison: no layer guarantees you will appear, and the upper layer does not work without the one beneath it.

How does an AI engine build an answer?

In three steps: it breaks the question into several searches (query fan-out), retrieves passages from an index and writes an answer that cites part of what it has read. Understanding this flow explains almost every GEO recommendation.

1. Query fan-out: one question, many searches

Google described it when it presented AI Mode at Google I/O on 20 May 2025: the system breaks the question down into subtopics and runs many queries at once on the user’s behalf. Its documentation adds that AI Overviews and AI Mode may use this technique, which is why they show a wider range of links than a classic search. The practical consequence: you are not only competing for the query the user types, but for the sub-questions the engine infers.

2. Retrieval: first, you have to be in the index

Before it writes, the engine searches. Google uses its own index; OpenAI explains that ChatGPT Search relies on third-party search providers and partner content, and that its crawler, OAI-SearchBot, is what determines inclusion: sites that block it do not appear in ChatGPT Search answers. This is where the SEO layer rules.

3. Citation: the model chooses whom to name

With the passages retrieved, the model writes its answer and links to only some of them. The passages that tend to make the cut answer a sub-question directly, with specific data and no ambiguity. The model may also name brands it does not link to, based on what other sources say. This is where AEO and GEO rule.

Try the flow in all three types of search engine. Notice how the deciding layer changes, and what happens to ‘your website’ in each case.

Generative engine optimisation: where does it come from, and what does it not promise?

Any answer to ‘what is GEO’ today should start with where the term came from. It comes from the paper ‘GEO: Generative Engine Optimization’ by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, published on arXiv on 16 November 2023 and presented at the KDD 2024 conference, held in Barcelona in August 2024. The first version was authored by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi.

The authors built GEO-bench, a benchmark of 10,000 queries across different domains, and tested nine ways of rewriting a page: adding citations to sources, quotations or statistics; making it more fluent, more technical or easier to understand; or good old keyword stuffing. They then measured how much visibility each version gained in the answers.

There are three useful takeaways. Adding statistics, quotations and references to sources worked best. Keyword stuffing did not help: it performed worse than the unoptimised version. And lower-ranked sites gained far more than those at the top, which even lost relative visibility.

The landscape has changed a great deal since then. AI Overviews launched in Spain on 25 March 2025, in Spanish and English, as part of a wider European roll-out; AI Mode expanded to more than 40 countries and 35 new languages in October 2025; and in July 2026 Google reported more than 1 billion monthly users of AI Mode. GEO is no longer an academic curiosity.

GEO and SEO in practice: what should you do in each layer?

Combining GEO and SEO means working from the bottom up: first get found, then make yourself extractable and, finally, get chosen. Skipping the first layer is the most expensive mistake, because it undermines everything else.

1. 1

   SEO layer: get crawled and indexed

   Check that your key pages are indexed in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Serve your important text as HTML from the server: according to a Vercel analysis from December 2024, the main AI crawlers did not execute JavaScript, except those running on Googlebot’s infrastructure. Make sure your robots.txt for AI does not block OAI-SearchBot or any other search bots you care about.

2. 2

   AEO layer: make your answer extractable

   Open every page with a 40- to 60-word answer that defines or resolves the question in the first sentence. Use H2s that mirror your customers’ real questions, tables for comparisons and lists for processes. Google stresses that you do not need special schema for AI, but any structured data you use must match the visible text.

3. 3

   GEO layer: get chosen and named

   Provide what the model cannot find elsewhere: your own data, figures with a source and date, concrete examples and an identifiable author. Cover the sub-questions in your topic (price, integration, timescales, alternatives) instead of writing only for the main keyword. And build your presence beyond your website: comparison sites, directories, media and reviews, always with your brand name written the same way.

4. 4

   Measurement: a fixed panel and many runs

   Define 20 to 50 questions your customers ask, run them several times on each engine and record whether you appear, how and with which source. Repeat the panel every few weeks with the same questions to spot trends.

Knowing the answer to ‘what is GEO’ is not enough if you do not know where your website stands. Run this quick check and tick what it already does: the score gives more weight to whatever blocks everything else, and tells you your next step.

How do you measure visibility in AI answers?

With statistics, not screenshots. An AI answer changes between runs, between engines and between users, so the useful metric is the percentage of answers you appear in for a fixed set of questions: questions × engines × runs.

A study by SparkToro and Gumshoe published in January 2026 illustrates this well: around 600 people ran 12 identical prompts nearly 3,000 times in ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI. The odds of getting the same list of brands twice were less than 1 in 100, and of getting it in the same order, roughly 1 in 1,000. Each brand’s rate of appearance, on the other hand, was reasonably stable. The lesson: forget about ‘position’ in an AI answer and measure frequency.

For the traffic that does reach you, combine these sources:

• Google Search Console: AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic is included in the performance report, under the ‘Web’ search type, without being separated from the rest.
• Bing Webmaster Tools: since February 2026 it has had an AI performance report (in preview) with citations in Copilot and in Bing’s AI summaries, plus a sample of the queries that led to you being cited.
• Web analytics: according to OpenAI’s publishers FAQ, ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends.
• Your question panel: the only way to see mentions without a click, which account for much of the value in GEO.

SEO vs GEO and AEO: frequently asked questions

Sources

• Aggarwal, P. et al. ‘GEO: Generative Engine Optimization’. arXiv 2311.09735 (v1, 16 November 2023; v3, 28 June 2024). KDD 2024, Barcelona.
• Google Search Central. AI features and your website (updated 10 December 2025).
• Google. AI Mode in Google Search: updates from Google I/O 2025 (20 May 2025).
• Google. We’re bringing the helpfulness of AI Overviews to more countries in Europe (25 March 2025).
• Google. AI Mode expands to more languages and locations (7 October 2025).
• Google. Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings: CEO remarks (22 July 2026).
• OpenAI. Introducing ChatGPT search (31 October 2024).
• OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI crawlers and Publishers and developers FAQ (accessed October 2026).
• SparkToro and Gumshoe. AIs are highly inconsistent when recommending brands or products (January 2026).
• Bing Webmaster Blog. Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (Public Preview) (February 2026).
• Vercel. The rise of the AI crawler (17 December 2024).