SEO vs AEO vs GEO: what each one is, and which one your business needs.

Read the columns as a sequence, not a menu. A page that search engines cannot crawl will not rank. A page that does not answer the question cleanly is hard to extract. And a business nobody credible mentions is hard for a model to cite.

Google is unusually direct on this point. Its page on AI features and your website says there are “no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.” It also says there are no special optimizations to make, and that you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup.

What Google does require is ordinary. To be shown as a supporting link, a page has to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. If you want to limit what Google shows from a page, the same controls apply as elsewhere in Search: nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet and noindex.

Google also says traffic from AI features is included in the overall search traffic in Search Console. So for Google, AEO and GEO are not a parallel system. They are what good SEO looks like when the result is an answer instead of a list of links.

A rule about Google is not a rule about every assistant. Each platform decides how it finds pages, and each one publishes its own documentation.

OpenAI, for example, documents three separate agents. OAI-SearchBot finds pages for ChatGPT search, and OpenAI says sites that opt out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, although they can still appear as navigational links. GPTBot collects content that may be used to train models, and OpenAI says each setting is independent, so you can allow search while declining training. ChatGPT-User visits a page when a person asks ChatGPT to open it.

The practical point: check your robots.txt file before worrying about anything clever. It is easy to block a crawler without meaning to, through an old rule, a plugin or a firewall setting, and no amount of content work fixes a door that is locked.

The term generative engine optimization comes from a research paper, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”, by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues. It was first posted in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024.

The authors built a benchmark of queries, GEO-bench, and tested ways of rewriting source pages to see which versions an AI answer engine used more. They ran it on an engine built on GPT-3.5 and checked the findings on Perplexity. Their best methods were adding citations to credible sources, adding quotations and adding statistics, which lifted visibility by roughly 30 to 40 percent in their measurements. Keyword stuffing, the reflex of old SEO, often made things worse.

Two cautions. These are lab results on a research benchmark, not a forecast for your website. And the winning tactics are not tricks. Specific claims, named sources and real numbers are simply easier for a model to use, and easier for a person to trust.

• Access. Pages have to be crawlable and indexable, and the crawlers you care about have to be allowed in.
• Direct answers. Put the answer to the question near the top of the page, in plain sentences that still make sense when quoted alone.
• Evidence. Claims with a source, numbers with a date and experts with a name. This is what the GEO research rewarded, and it is what Google's own starter guide points toward: pages written for people.
• Consistent facts. Your name, services, locations and prices should say the same thing everywhere they appear.
• Earned mentions. Reviews, press, partner pages and industry directories. Earned, not bought: Google's spam policies treat buying links for ranking purposes as link spam.

Start with the one everything else depends on. In most cases that is SEO: a site search engines can read, one clear page for each thing you sell, and answers to the questions buyers actually ask. If you are fuzzy on the basics, our explainer on what search engine optimization is covers them.

Then work outward in this order:

1. Make your answers easy to lift

Rewrite the pages that matter so the first paragraph answers the question. Add a short FAQ built from real customer questions, not invented ones. This is most of what AEO means in practice.

2. Give AI models something worth citing

Add sources, dates and specific numbers to your key pages. Publish the things only you know, such as prices, processes, comparisons and results you can defend. Then earn mentions from sites your customers already trust.

3. Start measuring the new surfaces

Search Console covers Google, including AI features. For assistants such as ChatGPT, record a fixed set of questions on a schedule and note who gets cited. Our guide to tracking your brand in AI search walks through a simple version.

A separate AEO or GEO budget line makes sense when the foundations are already solid and you want dedicated testing and tracking across platforms. Before that, it is usually the same work under a newer name. Our SEO service and AI search optimization pages describe how we scope each, and the diagnosis decides which one leads.