SEO, AEO and GEO: what actually differs, and what does not

Short answer: SEO is about ranking in search results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) is about being the direct answer a search engine shows. GEO (generative engine optimisation) is about being named or linked as a source inside an AI-written answer. Most of the work is shared. Google says its AI features need no special optimisation beyond ordinary good practice, and nobody can promise a citation.

Our view is that these three labels are often sold as three projects, and mostly they are one. A page that can be crawled, answers a real question plainly and says who stands behind it does most of the job for all three.

This page is for a small business owner, anywhere in the world, who has been offered “AEO” or “GEO” as an add-on and wants to know what is actually different. The regional guides at the bottom cover what changes by country.

What SEO, AEO and GEO mean, in plain words

SEO is search engine optimisation: making your pages easy for a search engine to find, understand and rank, so they appear in the ordinary list of results.

AEO is answer engine optimisation. AEO means shaping a page so a search engine can lift a short, direct answer from it and show that answer above the links. The featured snippet is the classic example.

GEO is generative engine optimisation: being named or linked as a source inside an answer an AI system has written, whether in a summary on a search page or in a chat assistant.

AEO and GEO are industry terms, not names Google or the AI companies use for their own products. As far as we have seen, the terms come from the marketing industry, not from the companies’ own documentation. A name for a goal is still useful. It just means nobody owns a rulebook.

One question, handled three ways

This is a hypothetical, not a client. A small firm services heat pumps, and a customer searches: “How often should a heat pump be serviced?”

A ranked result. The firm’s page appears in the ordinary list of links. The searcher has to click to read it. This is SEO.

A direct answer. The search engine lifts two sentences from the page and shows them above the links, as a featured snippet. This is what AEO usually aims at.

A cited source. An AI-written answer summarises several pages and links the firm’s page as one source. This is what GEO aims at.

In all three cases the firm did largely the same things on one page. It put the question in a heading, answered it in the first two sentences, and added its own reasoning below. It kept everything as text, not an image, and said plainly who the firm is and where it works.

We have deliberately not said how often a heat pump should be serviced, and we report no ranking, traffic or enquiry, because the firm is invented. The point is structural: one page, written once, could be ranked, lifted as an answer or cited as a source. One page served all three, and which outcome happens is the search engine’s decision, not the firm’s.

What differs between the three

	SEO	AEO	GEO
What you are trying to win	A place in the list of results	The direct answer above the links	A mention or link inside an AI-written answer
What the work is	Crawlable, indexed, helpful pages	Plain, quotable answers under question headings	Answers worth citing, with the right crawlers allowed in
How you measure it	Search Console: impressions, clicks, position, indexed pages	Search Console, plus checking by hand for a snippet	Google’s AI impressions report, Bing’s preview, manual checks

The first real difference is the unit that wins. In SEO it is a page. In AEO it is a passage, a couple of sentences that stand alone. In GEO it is a mention inside someone else’s answer. That is why advice for AEO and GEO leans on self-contained chunks of writing.

The second is which crawlers have to be allowed in. SEO depends on the search engine’s own crawler. The AI side adds more names, and each company splits them by purpose, as we set out below. An old robots.txt file or a host security setting can block something you now want read.

The third is measurement. SEO has mature tools. AI answers have thinner reporting, covered in its own section below.

What does not differ: the shared work

Most of a budget belongs here. Our view is that it should be spent here first, before anything labelled AEO or GEO.

Pages that can be crawled and indexed. Google says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear in its AI features. An unindexed page cannot rank, be lifted or be cited from Google’s results. Check this before paying for anything else.

Answers in text. A system can only quote what it can read. A price list inside an image, or an answer locked in a PDF, is hard to lift. Put it in plain text.

Clear statements of who you are and what you do. Name the business, what it offers, where it works and who the page is for, in ordinary sentences.

Consistent business details. Name, address, phone number and service area should match across your site, profiles and listings. It is a small, boring problem and cheap to fix.

Content written for people. Google’s page on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content says its ranking systems are designed to prioritise helpful, reliable information created to benefit people. Of experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, the page says “trust is most important”, and that E-E-A-T itself is not a specific ranking factor.

Here is our view, and it is ours, not a fact about any search engine. A business that has not done this list is paying for decoration on a building with no walls. One that has done it needs only a little extra for AEO and GEO: tighter answers and a crawler check.

What Google and the AI companies say themselves

These are the pages the companies publish for site owners, stated as what each says.

Google. The page AI features and your website, last updated on 10 December 2025, says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode”, and no other special optimisations are necessary. It says you do not need new machine readable files, AI text files or markup. It also says AI Overviews and AI Mode may use a technique Google calls “query fan-out”, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources to build a response. To limit what is shown from your pages, the controls it names are nosnippet, data-nosnippet and max-snippet.

On training, Google’s list of its common crawlers says Google-Extended is a robots.txt token that controls whether crawled content may be used for training future Gemini models and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Vertex AI. It adds: “Google-Extended does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.”

OpenAI. Overview of OpenAI Crawlers says “OAI-SearchBot is used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT’s search features.” Sites opted out of it “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers”, though they can still appear as navigational links. GPTBot crawls content that may be used in training OpenAI’s generative AI foundation models. ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user asks, and is not used to decide whether content may appear in search. The page also says “it can take ~24 hours from a site’s robots.txt update for our systems to adjust”.

Perplexity. Perplexity Crawlers says PerplexityBot is designed to surface and link websites in Perplexity search results, and is not used to crawl content for AI foundation models. Perplexity recommends allowing it in robots.txt. The page says Perplexity-User acts on a user’s request and generally ignores robots.txt rules, because a user requested the fetch.

Anthropic. The help article Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler? names three bots. ClaudeBot collects web content that could contribute to model training. Claude-User retrieves pages when a Claude user asks a question. Claude-SearchBot crawls to improve search result quality. Blocking Claude-User or Claude-SearchBot may reduce a site’s visibility in those answers, per the article.

Our observation: each of these companies separates a training crawler from a search or user crawler, so “block AI” is not one switch. Blocking a training crawler and blocking a search crawler are different decisions at each company. A blanket “block all AI” rule pasted from a template may remove you from the very answers you wanted to appear in.

Schema is not the shortcut it is sold as

Google’s AI features page says: “There’s also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add.”

On FAQ markup, the Google Search Central documentation updates have an entry dated 8 May 2026, “Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature”, saying the feature would no longer appear in Google Search starting 7 May 2026. An entry dated 15 June 2026 says the documentation for it was removed because the feature is no longer shown in Google Search results.

Our view: structured data that matches the page does no harm, but it is not what gets a page into an AI answer. Anyone selling FAQ markup as an AI requirement is out of date. If you have none, you are not behind. If you have some, make sure it matches the visible words.

Measuring each one, and where measurement runs out

SEO is measured in Search Console’s ordinary Performance report: impressions, clicks, average position, and which pages are indexed.

Google’s AI features. Google says sites appearing in AI features are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, in the Performance report within the “Web” search type. The help page Generative AI performance report (Search) describes impressions for AI Overviews and AI Mode, which can be grouped by page, country, date or device. It says: “As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out these insights to all websites worldwide.” It describes impressions only, with no click or query figure. We cover this in how to tell if Google AI Overviews are citing your business.

Bing and Copilot. The Bing Webmaster Blog post of 10 February 2026, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools (Public Preview), describes a public preview covering Microsoft Copilot, AI-generated summaries in Bing and select partner integrations. It shows total citations, average cited pages per day, a sample of “grounding queries” and page-level citation counts. The post says the figures do not indicate ranking, placement or a page’s importance within an answer.

The assistants. We have read nothing first-party from the chat assistants that tells a site owner how often their pages were cited.

So measurement of AI answers is immature: impressions without queries on Google, a sampled preview on Bing, nothing from the assistants. Treat any precise “AI visibility score” with caution and ask how it was collected.

What we do ourselves is manual, and it is our practice, not a standard. Pick your ten most common customer questions. Once a month, ask each one in the tools your customers use and record who is named.

What nobody can promise

Google says meeting the requirements guarantees nothing: a page may still not be crawled, indexed or served.

A site cannot mark its own page as a featured snippet. Google’s page on featured snippets, last updated on 10 December 2025, says Google’s systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a search request. The nosnippet rule blocks all snippets for a page. You can write for the format, but you cannot claim the slot.

None of the company pages we read explains how an assistant chooses which sources to cite. That is our observation about the pages we read. They describe crawlers, controls and reports, not selection. So any claim to know why one business is cited and another is not is a guess.

Our view: treat a guaranteed AI citation as a warning sign.

Where to put the first month of effort

This is our recommended order, not a rule from any search engine.

1. Check your pages are indexed. Use Search Console. A missing page needs fixing before anything else.
2. Check robots.txt and make the crawler decisions on purpose. Decide bot by bot, using each company’s own page, and make sure no host or CDN setting blocks visitors you want.
3. Answer your ten customer questions. Put each question in a heading, in the customer’s words, and answer it in the first two sentences.
4. Say who you are and where you work, in plain text.
5. Make your business details consistent across your site and every listing you control.
6. Then add depth and third-party mentions. Longer explanations of the hard parts of your trade, and honest mentions elsewhere, come after the basics.

For Google in more detail, see how to rank in Google AI Overviews. For a quick check of the basics, try our free SEO audit tool.

Regional guides

The advice above holds everywhere; what changes by country is language, rules and how people search.

• SEO, AEO and GEO in Australia: state-based search demand, Australian sources and how Australians phrase searches.
• SEO, AEO and GEO in Canada: two languages, provincial differences and Quebec’s Law 25, CASL and PIPEDA.
• SEO, AEO and GEO in the United States: metro-by-metro competition, state privacy laws and accessibility lawsuits.
• SEO, AEO and GEO in the United Kingdom: aggregators, the four nations, Companies House details and PECR.
• SEO, AEO and GEO in India: several languages, city tiers, marketplace listings and WhatsApp.
• SEO, AEO and GEO in the Middle East: Arabic and English, right-to-left pages, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia as separate markets.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

SEO is about ranking in search results. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is about being the direct answer a search engine shows. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is about being named or linked as a source inside an AI-written answer. Most of the work is shared. Google says its AI features need no special optimisation beyond ordinary good practice, and nobody can promise a citation.

What does AEO mean?

AEO means answer engine optimisation: shaping a page so a search engine can lift a short, direct answer from it and show that answer above the links. A featured snippet is the usual example. As far as we have seen, the term comes from the marketing industry, not from Google’s documentation. In practice it is mostly clear writing.

Is GEO just SEO with a new name?

Mostly, yes, though the label points at something real. GEO is about being named or linked inside an AI-written answer, which is a different outcome from ranking. But the work behind it overlaps heavily with SEO: pages that can be crawled and indexed, clear answers in text, and content written for people. Our view: GEO names a goal, not a separate discipline.

Does FAQ schema still help in 2026?

Not for the FAQ rich result in Google. Google’s documentation updates say that feature stopped appearing in Google Search from 7 May 2026, and its documentation was later removed. Google also says no special schema.org structured data is needed for its AI features. Our view: FAQ markup that matches the visible text does no harm, but it is not a shortcut.

Can anyone guarantee my business will be cited in an AI answer?

No. Google says meeting its requirements does not guarantee a page is crawled, indexed or served. None of the company pages we read explains how an assistant chooses which sources to cite, so any promise of a guaranteed citation is a guess. Our view: treat a guaranteed AI citation as a warning sign.

Will blocking AI crawlers remove my site from AI answers?

It depends on which crawler you block. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while GPTBot relates to training. Google says Google-Extended does not affect inclusion in Google Search. Each company whose pages we read separates training from search, so check which bot a rule names before you change robots.txt.

Which of the three should a small business start with?

Start with the shared work: make sure your pages are indexed, answer your customers’ ten most common questions in plain text, and state who you are and where you work. That serves all three at once. Our view: only after that is it worth deciding whether anything labelled AEO or GEO deserves a separate budget.

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