Reference
AEO and GEO: two names, one job
Answer engine optimisation and generative engine optimisation are mostly the same work under two labels. Here is the distinction that survives scrutiny, and which word we use for what.
Last updated 29 September 2026
The short answer
If someone is selling you AEO and someone else is selling you GEO, they are almost certainly selling you the same thing: being present when an AI system answers a question about your category. The terms are used interchangeably across the industry, and no standards body has ever defined either.
You do not need to buy two of them. You do need to know which one you are being quoted for, because the word tells you nothing about the scope.
What each word points at
| Term | Where it comes from | What it emphasises |
|---|---|---|
| AEO Answer engine optimisation | The featured-snippet and voice-assistant years, when the aim was to be the block of text a search engine extracted or the sentence a speaker read aloud. | Earning the answer, and the citation attached to it. Being the source. |
| GEO Generative engine optimisation | A 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, which coined the phrase and tested it. The term spread through venture and marketing writing during 2025. | How a model composes its answer, and how your brand is framed inside text you did not write. |
You will also meet AIO, AI SEO, LLMO and AI search optimisation. They are the same argument with different branding.
The distinction that is load-bearing
Strip the branding and one real difference is left, which is worth holding onto because it changes what you would do about it.
- Being cited is a discrete event. The answer links to your page, or names your brand. It either happened or it did not, and it can be counted.
- Being framed is not. The answer may describe your category in terms that favour a competitor’s positioning, mention you as the budget option, or attach a caveat to you and to nobody else. No link changes hands. Nothing is missing. You are simply described in a way you did not choose.
The first is what any monitoring product can measure, ours included. The second is harder, and most of what is sold as GEO does not touch it. We record the sentiment of each answer alongside the verdict for that reason, but a single reading is a long way from a full account of how you are being framed, and we would rather say so than imply the gap is closed.
Nobody at the engines uses either word
Worth noticing. Google’s own documentation calls them “AI features” and says of them: “There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary.” OpenAI and Anthropic publish nothing equivalent at all.
Both terms are vendor vocabulary, invented on the supply side of a market that is two years old. That does not make the underlying work fake — the research is real and the behaviour change is measured — but it should set your expectations about anyone who insists their acronym is the correct one.
What these words mean on this site
We separate them by who does the work, not by which engine is involved.
- Measurement is what you can buy self-serve, on any plan. We ask buyer questions in your category, record which answers name you, which name a competitor, and which sources those answers cite. We call it AI visibility monitoring in most places, because “GEO” explains nothing to someone meeting it for the first time. How we measure.
- AEO, on this site, is the doing rather than the watching: writing the evidence pages your category is missing and pursuing coverage on the publications the answers already cite. It sits on the Pro engagement — roughly 30 tracked questions with content and placement handled — and is sold as a conversation rather than a plan. Pricing.
Both have the same floor under them: we cannot make an engine mention you, and we do not sell a guarantee that we can. What content and coverage can do is change what sources exist for an engine to read. What they cannot do is decide what the engine does with them.
Sources
- Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv:2311.09735, November 2023; published in Proceedings of KDD ’24.
- Google Search Central, AI features and your website — for Google’s own naming, and its position on special optimisation.
- Profound, AEO vs. GEO: why they’re the same thing (and why we prefer AEO) — cited as a named practitioner’s position, not as a finding.
Where to go next
What generative engine optimisation is carries the research and the figures. A free AI visibility check tells you what the answers in your category say today.