The three terms, defined
| Term | Optimizes for | The unit of success |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Ranking in classic search results | Position and clicks |
| AEO (answer engine optimization) | Being the answer to a direct question - featured snippets, AI answers | Being quoted |
| GEO (generative engine optimization) | Citation inside generated answers: ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Claude | Being cited as a source |
In practice AEO and GEO describe the same work from different vintages - AEO grew out of the featured-snippet era, GEO out of the LLM era. Vocabulary aside, both reward one thing: being the source an engine trusts enough to lift.
What carries over from SEO
More than the hype admits. AI engines lean on retrieval - crawling, indexing, and ranking candidate sources before generating a word - so crawlability, clear structure, topical authority, and honest page titles still decide whether you are in the candidate pool. A site invisible to classic search is usually invisible to AI answers too. GEO is not a replacement for the fundamentals; it is a second scoring pass layered on top of them.
What genuinely changed
- The query surface exploded. People ask engines full questions they never typed into search boxes - and those questions carry zero recorded search volume. Whole categories of buyer pain live only in AI conversations now.
- Quotability beats comprehensiveness. Engines lift the passage that answers cleanly in two sentences, not the 4,000-word page that eventually gets there. Structure - a stated answer up top, steps, tables - is the ranking factor.
- Verification signals matter differently. Generated answers favor sources that state facts checkably: dates, methods, named mechanisms - over marketing prose.
- The click may never come. Success increasingly means your brand named inside the answer, with the visit arriving later and darker. Measurement has to change with it (see AI traffic measurement).
How we know, rather than believe
We run this discipline on ourselves and measure it: our own AI-visibility tracking account has logged thousands of AI answers across the topics we compete in, and our crawler-log tooling records which AI bots fetch which of our pages. In our own tracked sample, how-to and guide-format pages drew a majority of AI citations - which is why every recommendation on this site comes back to publishing verifiable answers, not press releases. (Our sample, our topics - treat the pattern as evidence, not a universal law.)