What is AEO, and is GEO the same thing?

by Harry Watts Published 30 October 2026 8 min read

AEO (answer engine optimisation), GEO (generative engine optimisation), AI SEO and LLM SEO are four names for the same job: getting a business found, read and named in AI answers, from Google's AI Overviews to ChatGPT. None of them is a separate discipline. Much of the work is search engine optimisation (SEO), aimed at a new kind of results page.

As with any new technology, there are many emerging schools of thought, and the industry will agree on one name eventually. Until then, it helps to know what each name means and where it came from, so a proposal using any of them can be read for what it actually offers.

Four names for one job

Each name started somewhere different, and each tends to be used by different people. What they describe overlaps almost entirely.

The GEO paper's authors tested ways of rewriting pages and report visibility gains of up to 40% in AI-written answers, varying by subject. That is a result from controlled tests, not a promise about any engine a business can buy. Paid search has its own alphabet, in a guide to the paid search acronyms.

Much of it is SEO

Some of the selling is a scare tactic: a new discipline, a new set of three-letter acronyms, and the message that a business not doing AEO or GEO right now will be left behind. There's some truth in that. But plenty of agencies pitch it as a new discipline entirely, and I think that's wrong. Many of the fundamentals are exactly the same as SEO, and that isn't acknowledged enough.

Google says so in as many words. Its guidance on AI Overviews and AI Mode says "the best practices for SEO remain relevant", that "there are no additional requirements" to appear in them, and that you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special structured data. To be shown as a source, a page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet in Google's ordinary results. Bing's rewritten guidelines are reported to make the same point from the other side: GEO doesn't guarantee a citation, just as SEO doesn't guarantee a ranking.

If you're worried about it, I'd start by reassuring you: many of the fundamentals are the same as the SEO you may already be doing. What's genuinely new is a shorter list.

What carries over unchanged:

• Pages that can be crawled and indexed. Google's AI features only link to pages in its index, and Microsoft says Copilot's web answers are grounded in Bing's results. For the ways a business gets onto Google in the first place, there's a guide to all four.
• Pages built around what people search. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may run several related searches for one question, which it calls query fan-out, and pick their links from what comes back. A page still has to match a search to be found.
• Content that is genuinely useful. Google judges content written with AI like any other, and says that using AI to produce many pages without adding value for users can breach its scaled content abuse policy.
• Clear about who wrote it. Google's guidance on helpful content names experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T), says trust matters most, and encourages accurate bylines.
• Mentioned on other sites. Reputation work is SEO work, and an engine that answers from a search index starts from what that index already holds.

What is genuinely new

None of the documentation checked for this guide says what makes a page quotable, so the second and third of these are the industry's working assumptions. The first and last are documented.

• Letting each AI engine's crawler in. Each company runs its own crawlers, and a block can sit in robots.txt or at the content delivery network (CDN), where it never shows in the file: Cloudflare has blocked AI crawlers by default on new domains since July 2025. Search and training crawlers are separate, so OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot, or Anthropic's Claude-SearchBot and ClaudeBot, can each be allowed or blocked on its own. The full list, and how to check each one, is in how to appear in ChatGPT's answers.
• Facts written to be quoted. The working assumption is that an AI answer is more likely to repeat a self-contained sentence than to piece a fact together from a page. A figure stated in one sentence, with its date and its source, can be repeated accurately; the same figure spread across three paragraphs is harder to repeat.
• One consistent description of the business. What the site, the Business Profile and other sites say you do, and where, should match. If they disagree, you've left the answer to choose between them.
• Measuring AI referrals. ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to many of the links it cites, so most of those visits can be picked out in analytics; some arrive without it, so treat the count as a minimum. Google doesn't separate AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console: they're counted in the Performance report with ordinary web results. Bing Webmaster Tools has shown citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries, in public preview, since February 2026.

On this site I allow every crawler, AI training ones included: the content here isn't the product, and the business needs the brand exposure. That's a judgement call, not a requirement, so look at what each crawler does and decide for your own site. There's an llms.txt file here too, though Google's John Mueller said in June 2025 that no AI system uses it, and Google says you don't need one.

What each AI engine reads

The engines don't share one index, and that is the practical difference from SEO. Google's answers come from Google's index. Copilot's come from Bing, and ChatGPT's are widely reported to lean on Bing too. So Bing, about 6% of UK searches, matters more for AI answers than its share suggests.

What to ask anyone selling it

Nobody outside the AI companies can guarantee a citation, and Bing's guidelines are reported to say as much. These questions show whether a proposal knows that.

• What will you change that my SEO doesn't already cover? If most of the answer is SEO, you know what you're buying.
• Which engines, and how will we know? A proposal should name the engines and say what it measures: tagged referrals from ChatGPT, citations in Bing Webmaster Tools, and the questions it will test by hand.
• Is anything guaranteed? A guaranteed citation in an AI answer is a promise nobody can keep.
• Who writes the content? Mass-produced pages are a risk under Google's scaled content abuse policy. Ask who writes them, and what each one adds.
• Will you check the CDN as well as robots.txt? A crawler blocked at the firewall looks allowed in the file.

Quick answers

Getting it done for you

If you'd like the job done, whatever it's called, that's what AI search optimisation is. If you'd like to talk it through first, a free intro call is thirty minutes.