GEO vs AEO vs SEO: What’s the Difference?

Last updated October 8, 2026

The short answer: GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) describe largely the same work: making sure AI-generated answers can find, use and correctly represent what you publish. SEO is about earning a ranked link. For a product page, GEO and AEO lead to the same to-do list.

Where the three terms come from

SEO is the long-standing practice of ranking pages in search results.
AEO was used for answer surfaces before generative AI went mainstream — featured snippets, voice assistants — and now covers AI assistants too.
GEO comes from research on generative engines; the term was popularized by the paper “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” (Aggarwal et al., first posted November 2023, accepted to KDD 2024).

SEO vs AEO vs GEO compared

	SEO	AEO	GEO
Where it shows	Search results pages	Any answer surface: AI assistants, AI Overviews, snippets, voice	Generative AI answers: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, AI Overviews
What success looks like	A high ranking and a click	Being named and described correctly in the answer	Being cited or named in the generated answer
Main question	Can people find this page?	Does the answer get our facts right?	Does the model use our content?
Typical measures	Rankings, impressions, clicks	Answer text, citations, AI referral visits	Citations and mentions across models

Is AEO part of GEO, or the other way round?

Teams use the words differently. Some treat GEO as the generative-AI part of AEO; others use GEO for everything AI and AEO for snippets and voice. The disagreement is mostly about naming. What matters is the outcome you check: when a buyer asks an assistant about a product like yours, is your product in the answer, and are its facts right?

What to do on a product page (whatever you call it)

Start from buyer questions, with their conditions, not from keywords.
Publish the facts those questions need: specs, fit, compatibility, price and terms, and who it’s not for.
Connect claims to sources for the exact model.
Keep the facts consistent across your site, marketplaces and documents.
Ask the same questions again and compare like with like over time.

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Which term should you use?

Use the one your team and your buyers already use. In search, more people type “AEO vs SEO” than “GEO vs AEO”, but both describe the same shift. Spend the energy on the facts, not the acronym.

More on each: Answer Engine Optimization · Generative Engine Optimization · AEO vs SEO.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO the same as AEO?

Largely, yes. Both are about making your content usable and correctly represented in AI-generated answers. The terms come from different communities; for product pages they lead to the same work.

Is SEO replaced by GEO?

No. Generative answers that use current information usually retrieve pages from a search index first, so SEO still decides whether your page can be found. GEO and AEO build on it.

How do I do AEO and GEO?

Start from the questions buyers ask, publish the facts those questions need with their sources and limits, keep them consistent across channels, then ask the same questions again and compare the answers over time.

What does LLMO mean?

LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) is another name for the same idea: making your content usable by large language models. It is used less often than GEO or AEO.

GEO vs AEO vs SEO: three names, and what actually differs