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

SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of making your pages rank in search engine results, mainly Google and Bing, so people click through to your site. Success is a position in a list and a visit.

AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of making your content and your brand easy for answer engines to find, trust and quote, so the answer itself names you or links to you. The term is older than ChatGPT. It started with featured snippets and voice assistants, and now covers Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT search, Gemini, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot.

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of increasing how visible your content is inside AI-generated answers. The term was coined by researchers in a 2023 paper and is mostly used for generative tools: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot.

Here’s how they line up at a glance.

Notice that the AEO and GEO columns are almost identical. The bigger gap is between SEO and the other two, and even that gap is narrower than it looks.

If you need a refresher on how answer engines pick their sources in the first place, start with our complete guide to answer engine optimization, then come back here for the comparison.

GEO vs SEO is really a question about what kind of engine you’re optimizing for. SEO optimizes for a ranking engine that sorts pages. GEO optimizes for a generative engine that reads pages and writes something new.

The term comes from a November 2023 paper, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, by Pranjal Aggarwal of IIT Delhi and colleagues from Princeton and elsewhere, later presented at KDD 2024 (Aggarwal et al.).

What the GEO study found

The researchers built a benchmark called GEO-bench with 10,000 queries, rewrote source content in different ways, and measured how much of each source showed up in the generated answer. Usefully for this comparison, they tested SEO-style and GEO-style changes side by side.

Three methods stood out: citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics. The best methods improved visibility over the baseline by 41% on their main word-count metric and 28% on a subjective impression score, which the abstract rounds to “up to 40%”.

Keyword stuffing, the oldest trick in the SEO book, scored below the baseline (17.7 vs 19.3). On a live Perplexity test it did 10% worse than doing nothing, while adding quotations improved visibility by 22%.

That finding matters most. Lower-ranked sources gained the most from GEO methods. Generative engines don’t simply reward whoever ranks first; they reward the most quotable, well-supported material.

The honest caveats

The study ran on the researchers’ own benchmark plus a smaller Perplexity test, not on live ChatGPT or AI Overviews as they work today. Treat the exact percentages as directional.

Where GEO and SEO meet

None of this means GEO replaces SEO. Engines must retrieve your page before quoting it, and Google says its AI features use its core Search ranking systems to retrieve pages from its index (Google Search Central). GEO is what you do to content once SEO has made it findable. For the term’s full background, see our GEO explainer.

AEO vs GEO is the comparison people argue about most, and it matters least. The work is almost the same. The difference is mostly history and emphasis.

AEO grew up in the featured snippet and voice era, when one page was read out as “the answer”. Today most practitioners use it as an umbrella that also covers AI Overviews and chatbots.

GEO was born in the generative era. It assumes a model reads several sources and writes a new answer, so the goal is to be one of the sources it credits.

Some draw a sharper line: AEO aims to be the extracted answer, GEO aims to be one of several cited sources. That’s fair as history. But any AEO or GEO checklist has the same tasks: crawler access, answer-first passages, clear facts, matching structured data, third-party mentions and prompt tracking.

Who uses which word

Google’s 2026 guide names both terms. It says AEO and GEO are “terms you may see used to describe work specifically focused on improving visibility in AI search experiences”, and then says that from Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, “and thus still SEO” (Google Search Central).

Microsoft took the opposite naming approach. When it launched AI Performance reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools on 10 February 2026, it called the release “an early step toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tooling” (Bing Webmaster Blog).

You’ll also see LLM SEO, LLMO and AI SEO. They describe the same goal from slightly different angles. Our guide to LLM SEO covers the content side under that name.

Pro tip

Pick one term and use it consistently inside your company. We use AEO at Grixhub because it covers every surface where an answer replaces a list, including featured snippets and AI Overviews. What matters is that everyone on the team means the same set of tasks when they say it.

The overlap between SEO, AEO and GEO is large enough that we usually describe it as one stack with layers, not three separate disciplines.

Access and indexing. Every engine needs to fetch and index your page, whether through Googlebot, Bing, OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot. If your server, CDN or robots.txt blocks them, nothing else matters.

Helpful content. Google’s ranking systems and its AI features both reward content made for people, with real experience behind it. The GEO research points the same way.

Page experience. Google’s May 2025 tips for AI search included “Provide a great page experience” next to “Ensure we can access your content” (Search Engine Land). It reads like an SEO checklist because it is one.

Structured data that matches the page. Schema doesn’t win AI answers by itself, and Google says no special markup is needed. But markup that accurately describes your business, products and authors helps every machine reader. We cover what’s worth adding in our schema markup guide for AEO.

E-E-A-T. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust are how Google describes quality, and what makes a model comfortable repeating a claim.

So where’s the gap? It sits in three places: how passages are written, how much off-site reputation counts, and how results are measured. Those are what the next sections cover.

This is the single most important difference between SEO and AEO, and it’s backed by solid data.

In August 2025, Ahrefs ran 15,000 long-tail prompts through ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity. For each prompt, it checked whether the URLs the assistant cited also ranked in Google’s or Bing’s top 10 for that same prompt (Ahrefs).

Across platforms, only about 12% of cited URLs ranked in Google’s top 10. For ChatGPT’s in-text citations it was 8.0%; Perplexity, which runs its own index, was highest at 28.6%. For every assistant except Perplexity, more than 80% of citations came from pages that didn’t rank at all for the target query.

Why the overlap is so low

Query fan-out. The AI doesn’t search for your prompt. It searches for several smaller questions derived from it. The page that ranks for the full prompt may not be the best answer for any one of those sub-questions.

Passage selection. The engine pulls the best paragraph for each sub-question, wherever it lives. A well-written section on a page that ranks 30th can beat a vague section on the page that ranks first.

Different indexes. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot don’t use Google’s index. Perplexity has its own crawler; Copilot is built on Bing; ChatGPT uses OpenAI’s own search crawler. Rankings on one engine don’t transfer automatically.

The data has limits: ChatGPT’s results were a snapshot from early July 2025, AI Mode wasn’t covered, and Ahrefs sells AI visibility tools. But the gap is too wide to be noise.

What this means for our example firm

Say the accounting firm ranks third on Google for “accounting firm for foreign companies in Thailand”. When someone asks ChatGPT the longer version, the answer might cite a government page for the VAT rules, a forum thread for first-hand experience and a competitor’s FAQ for the documents needed. The firm’s page answers none of those sub-questions directly, so it isn’t cited.

The fix isn’t to abandon the ranking. It’s to make sure the page also contains the passages the sub-questions need. Our guide to how AI search engines work goes deeper into retrieval and fan-out if you want the mechanics.

The difference between SEO and AEO content is less about topics and more about how each section is written.

Classic SEO content is planned around a keyword and judged as a whole page. A page could bury its best answer in the fifth paragraph and still rank.

AEO and GEO content is judged one passage at a time. A section only helps if it answers a question on its own. That changes the writing in five ways.

The answer moves to the top. Each section opens with one or two sentences that answer its heading directly. The detail follows. This is the single habit that makes the biggest difference, and it’s the format you’re reading right now.

Headings become questions. “Our services” becomes “Which tax filings do you handle for foreign-owned companies?”, matching how people ask AI tools.

Adjectives give way to facts. “Fast, reliable service” can’t be quoted. “We file your monthly VAT return and send an English summary within two working days” can. Numbers, dates, prices or price ranges, locations and eligibility rules are what answers are made of.

Claims get sources. The GEO study found that citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics were the most effective changes it tested. If you state a rule or a number, link to where it comes from.

Authorship is visible. A named author with real experience and an honest update date show who stands behind the claim.

What doesn’t change

Google’s 2026 guide is a useful brake here: you don’t need to write a special way for AI or chop content into tiny pieces. Answer-first writing isn’t an AI trick. It’s how good reference writing has always worked.

The practical rule: write for a busy person first, then check that each section still makes sense if quoted alone. Our guide to answer-first writing has the full method.

The first version has nothing an AI tool could repeat. The second answers a real question and makes sense on its own. Before you publish, the free AEO Content Checker scores a page for this kind of structure in your browser.

On the technical side, the difference between SEO and AEO is mainly about which bots you let in.

Classic SEO had two crawlers that mattered: Googlebot and Bingbot. AEO adds several more. Some fetch pages for AI answers; others collect content to train models. You can treat them differently.

The details come straight from each company. OpenAI says OAI-SearchBot is used to show websites in ChatGPT search results, GPTBot collects content that may be used to train its models, and “each setting is independent of the others” (OpenAI). So you can block training and still appear in ChatGPT search.

Perplexity says PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its search results and isn’t used to crawl content for AI foundation models; its user-triggered fetcher, Perplexity-User, generally ignores robots.txt (Perplexity).

Microsoft says Copilot Search began inside Bing and shows clickable citations inline (Microsoft), so Bing Webmaster Tools matters more for AEO than many SEO teams assume.

Google is the simplest case: its AI features use the Search index, and snippet controls such as nosnippet and max-snippet limit what it shows (Google Search Central).

Our free AI Crawler Checker tests whether your robots.txt lets the main AI crawlers in. If you’re unsure whether to add an llms.txt file on top, read our llms.txt explainer; it’s optional, and Google says it doesn’t need one.

The reason this comparison matters commercially is simple: the click, which SEO was built around, is getting scarcer on exactly the queries where AI answers appear.

Zero-click searches are rising. SparkToro’s analysis of Similarweb data found that 68.01% of US Google searches ended without a click from January to April 2026, up from 60.45% in 2024. AI Overviews appeared on more than 20% of searches (Search Engine Land).

People click less when an AI summary shows. Pew Research Center tracked 900 US adults across 68,879 Google searches in March 2025. With an AI summary, users clicked a regular result on 8% of visits, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary on just 1% (Pew Research Center).

A controlled experiment agrees. Saharsh Agarwal (Indian School of Business) and Ananya Sen (Carnegie Mellon) ran a randomized field experiment with 1,065 desktop Chrome users in early 2026. AI Overviews cut outbound organic clicks by 39.8% in the June 2026 revision of the paper, a preprint on SSRN that isn’t yet peer-reviewed (PPC Land).

Top results lose the most. Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords between December 2023 and December 2025 and found that an AI Overview correlated with a 58% lower clickthrough rate for the top-ranking page, up from 34.5% in its April 2025 study (Ahrefs). The data is desktop-only and correlational.

Where AEO changes the math

Here’s where AEO changes the math. Seer Interactive studied 3,119 informational queries across 42 organizations from June 2024 to September 2025. Organic CTR on queries with an AI Overview fell 61%, from 1.76% to 0.61%. But brands cited inside the AI Overview earned 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than brands that weren’t (Seer Interactive).

Seer stresses that this is correlation: stronger brands may be both more cited and more clicked. Still, the shift is clear. SEO alone competes for a shrinking pool of clicks; SEO plus AEO also competes for attention inside the answer.

We cover the full picture of falling clicks in our guide to zero-click search, and more numbers in our AI search statistics roundup.

Are AI clicks worth more than organic clicks?

If AI answers send fewer clicks, are those clicks worth more? Probably, with big caveats. In May 2025, Google’s John Mueller said that when people click to a website from results pages with AI Overviews, “these clicks are higher quality, where users are more likely to spend more time on the site” (Search Engine Land). Google hasn’t published the underlying data.

Semrush made the most cited estimate. In July 2025, it said the average AI search visitor, tracked to non-Google sources such as ChatGPT, is 4.4 times as valuable as the average traditional organic visitor, based on conversion rate. It also projected that AI search visitors could overtake traditional search visitors by early 2028 (Semrush).

Treat both as a hint, not a plan. The 4.4x figure rests on conversion rate alone, the dataset isn’t published, the 2028 date is an extrapolation, and Semrush sells AI visibility tools. The logic is sound, though: someone who asked a detailed question, read a summary and then clicked is further along than someone scanning ten blue links.

The honest answer to “which one should we do?” is that it’s the wrong question. The useful question is: in what order, and with how much weight?

SEO first, almost always

If your site has crawl problems, thin pages or indexing gaps, fix that first. Every AI platform depends on search retrieval: Google’s AI features use its core ranking systems, Copilot runs on Bing, and ChatGPT and Perplexity crawl the web for search. Skipping SEO to “do GEO” is like painting a house that has no walls.

AEO next, and earlier for some businesses

Once your important pages are indexed and reasonably visible, AEO is where the next gains are. Some businesses should move it up the list.

Research-heavy purchases. If buyers compare options for weeks, as with B2B services, education, healthcare, travel and finance, they’re likely asking AI tools detailed questions. Our accounting firm sits squarely here.

Categories with few clicks left. If AI Overviews already show on your key informational queries, competitors are building their place in the answer now.

GEO as part of AEO

Don’t run GEO as a separate project with its own team and reports. The tasks are the same as AEO for generative tools, so treat GEO as that slice of your AEO plan.

If you’d rather have someone look at your situation directly, our AEO service and SEO service are run by the same team for exactly this reason: the work only makes sense together.

Because AEO and GEO are new and commercially hot, a lot of advice about them is oversold. These are the myths we hear most.

Myth 1: SEO is dead, GEO replaced it. AI tools retrieve pages through search systems. Clicks are falling on some queries, but the foundation AI answers stand on is SEO.

Myth 2: You need llms.txt to show up in AI. Google says you don’t need AI text files or special markup for its AI features. An llms.txt file is cheap and harmless, but it isn’t a ranking switch.

Myth 3: AI needs special schema. Google says no special schema.org markup is needed. Accurate structured data is still good SEO practice, but it doesn’t buy citations on its own.

Myth 4: Chop every page into tiny chunks. Google says there’s no such requirement. Clear structure works: a direct answer under each heading and sections that stand on their own.

Myth 5: Mentions can be manufactured. The correlation between brand mentions and AI visibility is real, but Google warns that seeking inauthentic mentions isn’t as helpful as it might seem, and its spam systems are designed to catch it. Buying forum posts is a short road to a bad reputation.

Myth 6: AEO results show up in a week. Some technical fixes show up fast, but rewritten pages must be recrawled and reputation takes months. Google itself warns about tools that promise ranking success.

Most AEO advice assumes an English-only market. If your buyers search in two languages, as in Thailand, there are a few extra wrinkles.

Two languages means two sets of questions. A Thai founder and a foreign director may ask about the same service in different words, languages and platforms. SEO handles this with separate Thai and English pages and hreflang; AEO adds that the Thai questions people ask AI tools often differ in substance, not just translation.

Translated-sounding pages are weak sources. A page translated word for word from English often misses how Thai buyers phrase the question, which hurts it in both rankings and answers.

Local platforms carry the reputation. In Thailand, much of the talk about businesses happens on Pantip, in Facebook groups and in LINE chats, alongside Google reviews. Pantip threads are public pages AI tools can read; LINE chats are private, so they shape word of mouth but not AI answers.

Google Business Profile matters twice. For local searches, a complete Google Business Profile helps in Maps and local results, and it gives Google’s AI features clear facts about a business: hours, location, services and reviews. For our accounting firm, that’s an easy shared win for SEO and AEO.

The same applies in any market where buyers use more than one language, from Singapore to Canada: run prompt tracking in each language and expect different answers. Our guide to doing SEO in Thailand covers the bilingual SEO side.

1. Google Search Central: Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (published May 2026, updated 10 Jul 2026)
2. Google Search Central: AI features and your website (updated 10 Dec 2025)
3. Google Search Central Blog: Introducing Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (June 2026)
4. PPC Land: Google gives Search Console its own generative AI visibility reports (3 Jun 2026)
5. Search Engine Watch: Google's Generative AI report in Search Console rolling out globally (2026)
6. Bing Webmaster Blog: Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, public preview (10 Feb 2026)
7. Microsoft: Bringing the best of AI search to Copilot
8. OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlers
9. Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers
10. Aggarwal et al.: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024)
11. Ahrefs: Only 12% of AI-cited URLs rank in Google's top 10 for the original prompt (11 Aug 2025)
12. Ahrefs: An analysis of AI Overview brand visibility factors, 75K brands studied (26 May 2025)
13. Ahrefs: Update: AI Overviews reduce clicks by 58% (4 Feb 2026)
14. Seer Interactive: AIO impact on Google CTR, September 2025 update (4 Nov 2025)
15. Search Engine Land: Google zero-click searches reach 68% in early 2026 (SparkToro / Similarweb data)
16. Pew Research Center: Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears (22 Jul 2025)
17. PPC Land: Researchers find Google AI Overviews cut publisher clicks 39.8% (Agarwal and Sen, SSRN, 2026)
18. Semrush: AI search and SEO traffic study (21 Jul 2025)
19. Search Engine Land: Google shares 8 ways to be successful with AI search experiences (May 2025)
20. eWEEK: ChatGPT nears 1 billion weekly users (27 Feb 2026)
21. Neowin: Google products with more than 1 billion users, including AI Mode (Google I/O, May 2026)

Keep reading

• AEO basicsWhat Is AEO? Answer Engine Optimization Explained
• AEO basicsWhat Is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization Explained
• AI platformsHow to Get Cited by ChatGPT
• AI platformsHow to Optimize for AI Search: A Step-by-Step Guide