AEO and GEO, explained in plain English (and what Google says about both)

Two acronyms have colonised marketing conversations lately: AEO, answer engine optimisation, and GEO, generative engine optimisation. Both get sold as revolutionary, both get sold as separate products, and both are simpler than the people selling them tend to admit. Here is the plain version: what each one actually is, what the work actually involves, what Google has said on the record, and the questions to ask anyone who tries to sell you either as a new invoice.

The one-sentence definitions

AEO is making your pages easy for answer systems to quote: the question stated plainly, the answer given first, the page trustworthy enough to cite. GEO is making your business easy for AI systems to recommend: consistently described, genuinely reviewed and credibly mentioned across the wider web those systems read. One works at the level of the page; the other at the level of the business’s reputation. We keep a full page on each, here, but that distinction is the whole taxonomy, and everything below is detail hanging off it.

Why two names exist at all

Because two different kinds of system are reading about you, and they read differently.

Google’s AI features, the Overviews at the top of results and the conversational AI Mode, are built directly on Google’s ordinary index and ranking systems: the same crawling, the same quality signals, the same judgements about which pages deserve trust. Google has said this explicitly in its official guidance, along with something the industry needed to hear: there is no special file, no special code and no special format for appearing in its AI results. For Google’s surfaces, the work is the page-level discipline, AEO, sitting on ordinary SEO health.

Assistants like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, meanwhile, also weigh the wider web when deciding what to recommend: what industry publications, review platforms, communities and video say about you, not just what your own site says. Pew Research Center’s study of nearly seventy thousand real searches found the typical AI summary cites three or more sources, and question-shaped searches, the ones beginning who, what or why, triggered an AI answer 60% of the time. The machine is assembling a view of your business from everything it can read. That business-level layer is GEO’s territory.

What the AEO work actually involves

Strip the acronym away and AEO is a writing and structure discipline. In practice it means:

The question, stated the way people ask it. Answer systems match questions to content. A heading that says what the reader actually typed beats a clever one every time.

The answer, given first. A direct, complete answer in the opening lines of the section, with the elaboration after it, not before. Machines lift the passage that answers cleanly; so do impatient humans.

Pages a machine can trust. Named authors, dated content, claims backed by sources, and information consistent with what the rest of the web says about the subject. The systems are conservative quoters: they cite what looks reliable.

Structure a machine can read. Clear headings, one idea per section, and content labelled properly behind the scenes so the systems know a question is a question and an answer is an answer.

None of this is exotic, and that is the point worth sitting with: every item on that list also makes the page better for a human reader and stronger in ordinary rankings. The overlap is not a coincidence to manage; it is the mechanism.

What the GEO work actually involves

GEO is a reputation discipline, and the evidence on what moves it is unusually clear. Ahrefs analysed 75,000 brands and found the factor most strongly linked to AI visibility was not rankings and not raw backlink counts; it was mentions, how often a brand gets talked about across the web in articles, guides, forums and video. That is correlation rather than proof, and some of it simply reflects brands that were already well known, but every serious study points the same way. Seer Interactive’s data adds the commercial edge: brands cited inside AI answers earn 35% more organic clicks than brands on the same results page that are not cited.

So the practical GEO work is: a consistent description of your business everywhere it appears, so the machines can be confident they know who you are; genuine reviews in the places your industry is reviewed; and real, earned mentions from publications and communities that matter in your field. Google’s guidance carries a warning here that doubles as a buyer’s guide: manufacturing mentions of your business around the web risks being treated as spam. The systems reward reputations that are real, which means GEO ultimately rewards exactly one strategy: actually being reputable, visibly. Our digital PR piece covers how earned coverage feeds this.

What Google actually said, in one paragraph

Because so much is claimed on Google’s behalf, the on-record position is worth having straight. Google’s guidance for its AI features says the foundations are unchanged: make great content for people, ensure it can be crawled and indexed, and there is no separate optimisation track, no special markup and no shortcut for AI results. Its own phrase for the work is that it is still SEO. And it warns against schemes that fabricate authority. Anyone whose pitch contradicts those three points is contradicting the platform they claim to optimise for.

The questions to ask anyone selling you AEO or GEO

Not because the disciplines are fake, but because the packaging often is. Four questions sort the real practitioners from the acronym resellers quickly:

1. What would you do differently from good SEO? The honest answer describes emphasis, not a separate system: more question-led structure, more attention to consistency and earned mentions. An answer describing a secret method contradicts Google’s published position.
2. How will you measure it? Citations and mentions across the named engines, tracked over time, alongside rankings and enquiries. If the answer is impressions alone, keep asking.
3. Where does the authority come from? Earned coverage and genuine reviews are the right answer. Anything that sounds like buying or manufacturing mentions is the thing Google’s guidance warns about.

We should declare our own position while handing you those questions: we do not sell AEO or GEO as separate line items, because in our view they are disciplines inside the search work, not new invoices beside it. Across sixteen months of our own client data, the accounts winning AI citations are the ones whose fundamentals were done properly, not the ones chasing a trick.

The self-test

Ask an assistant your best customer’s question, phrased the way a real customer would ask it. If competitors are named and you are not, work out which half is missing. Pages that do not answer plainly are an AEO gap: the machine cannot lift what you never state directly. A reputation the machines cannot find is a GEO gap: you may be excellent, but excellence the web has not recorded is invisible to a system that reads the web. Most businesses discover they have some of each, which is convenient, because the same programme of work addresses both.

Run the test properly

Our free AI-search visibility check runs the self-test across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI and Perplexity, reviewed by a person, with you within a working day.