What do AEO and GEO each mean?
| Term | Goal | Where it shows up |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Rank your pages as links in search results. | Lists of blue links. |
| AEO (answer engine optimisation) | Make your content the direct answer to a question. | Featured answers, voice answers and AI answer boxes. |
| GEO (generative engine optimisation) | Improve how AI assistants retrieve, cite and describe your business. | Answers written by ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI features. |
How is this different from SEO?
Search results rank links and let the reader choose. An assistant writes one answer and may name or cite a few sources. A page can rank well and still not be quoted, and a business can be described from someone else's page about it.
What stays the same?
Pages still need to be crawlable, indexed, accurate and useful. Many assistants use web search to find sources, so the basics of search still matter. AEO and GEO add three questions: is the answer easy to quote, do the facts agree across the web, and do we know what assistants actually say?
What should a company do first?
- Write down the questions buyers ask when choosing a supplier.
- Run them on several assistants, more than once, and record the results with dates. How to measure.
- Trace wrong or missing answers to their source pages.
- Fix what you control first: your own pages. What a quotable page contains.
Related answers
General information, checked 27 October 2026.
Assistants change often. Where a point is inference rather than a published rule, the page says so. Results vary and are never guaranteed.