SEO gets you into a list of links. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) gets you quoted inside a direct answer. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) gets you into the text a model generates. Same goal, being visible, three different places to be visible in.
That distinction sounds academic until you try to budget for it. The three disciplines share a technical foundation, diverge on what they optimize, and are measured in units that do not convert into each other. Here is what separates them, and which one to work on first.
The short version
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Target | Traditional search results | AI answer engines, voice and text | Generative engines, the models themselves |
| What winning looks like | A position in a list of links | A citation inside a direct answer | Your wording reused in generated text |
| Unit of measurement | Rank, clicks, impressions | Citation rate, share of answers | Share of Model, meaning your share of AI citations, plus sentiment and accuracy |
| Priority signals | Backlinks, keywords, technical health | Clarity, structure, trust | Semantic coherence, how content is chunked |
| Maturity | Very established | Growing fast | Emerging |
In short: SEO optimizes for a rank in a list, AEO for a citation inside an answer, GEO for inclusion in generated text. They share technical foundations but are measured in different units, so progress on one does not automatically show up in the others.
AEO vs SEO: the difference that matters
SEO earns a position. AEO earns a quote.
The practical consequence is that the two are measured differently and can move in opposite directions. A page can rank fourth on Google and never be cited by ChatGPT. Another can be quoted constantly by Perplexity while sitting on page three. We see this on our own site: several pages hold positions between 8 and 11 for thousands of impressions and convert almost nothing, because the impressions come from queries no human is reading the results page for.
What AEO adds on top of SEO is a formatting discipline. An answer engine lifts passages, not pages. A section that opens with a complete, self-contained answer can be extracted. A section that builds to its point across four paragraphs cannot. That is why AEO work tends to look like editing rather than writing: the substance is often already there, buried below a run-up.
What it does not replace is the technical foundation. Generative engines rely on classic indexes to find their sources, so a page that Google cannot crawl is a page no answer engine will quote either. AEO is a layer on SEO, not a substitute for it.
AEO vs GEO: a real distinction, often blurred
AEO covers every answer engine, including voice assistants and Google's AI Overviews. GEO narrows to generative engines specifically, and to the mechanics of how a model chunks, weights and reassembles content into an answer.
In everyday use, most practitioners treat AEO as the umbrella and GEO as the part of it that deals with large language models. That is a defensible simplification. The distinction becomes concrete when you start measuring, because the two do not produce the same numbers.
Here is what we mean, with our own data. Across seven tracked brands and close to 2,000 queries run against the engines, the citation rate is 13 %, so nearly nine answers out of ten name someone else. Broken down by engine, on those with at least 100 queries: Anthropic 17 %, Google 16 %, Grok 15 %, OpenAI 14 %, Perplexity 11 %.
The figure that matters is the ranking itself, because it changes from one brand to the next. On our own site, Anthropic is the weakest engine at 2 %, while it is the strongest across the brands we monitor. Same discipline, opposite result. A GEO strategy built on someone else's engine ranking would have sent us in precisely the wrong direction.
In short: AEO is the umbrella covering all answer engines, GEO the narrower practice aimed at generative models. Measured across seven tracked brands and close to 2,000 queries, the overall citation rate is 13 %, and the per-engine ranking differs from one brand to the next, which is why generic playbooks fail.
Which one do you work on first?
The honest answer depends on where your buyers actually are, and that is measurable rather than debatable.
If your traffic still comes overwhelmingly from Google and your market has not moved, SEO remains the largest lever and AEO is an editing pass on top of it. Doing the AEO pass costs little once the content exists, so there is rarely a reason to skip it.
If your buyers open ChatGPT or Perplexity before Google, the ranking you hold matters less than whether you are named in the answer. That is where AEO and GEO become the primary work, and where the measurement has to change with it. Counting positions tells you nothing about a channel that returns no positions.
Most teams sit between the two, which argues for a specific sequence rather than a choice. Fix the technical foundation once, because all three disciplines depend on it. Run the AEO editing pass on the pages that already have impressions, because the cost is low and the pages already exist. Then measure across engines before committing to GEO work, because the per-brand variance means the starting point is not the same for everyone.
What they share
Underneath the three acronyms there is one common requirement, and it is not technical. An engine that has nothing specific to quote will quote someone else. Structure and schema make a page readable, but readability is not a reason to be chosen.
When we scored 767 pages from four competing platforms with a System One model, the archetype that scored highest on proof and originality was the case study, at 2.67 and 2.49 out of 3. The lowest was the programmatic integration page, at 0.91 and 1.00. Both kinds of page are equally crawlable. Only one gives an engine something worth lifting.
Our verdict
The three terms are not interchangeable, but the distinction is less useful than the sequencing. SEO builds the foundation the other two stand on. AEO is the formatting discipline that makes your content extractable. GEO is the measurement and optimization layer aimed at the models themselves, and it is the only one of the three where a generic playbook is actively risky, because the per-brand variance is large.
Start by measuring where you actually stand. Our audit is free, and it will tell you which of the three is your bottleneck rather than which is fashionable.
What is the difference between AEO and SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) works to place a page in the list of links a search engine returns, and is measured in rank, clicks and impressions. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) works to have a passage of that page quoted inside a direct answer, and is measured in citation rate and share of answers. The two overlap on technical foundations, since answer engines rely on classic indexes to find their sources, so a page Google cannot crawl will not be quoted either. They diverge on format: a search engine ranks pages, an answer engine lifts passages. That is why AEO work usually looks like editing rather than writing. The substance is often already present, buried under a run-up that makes the passage impossible to extract on its own.
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
AEO is the umbrella term covering every answer engine, including voice assistants and Google's AI Overviews. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) narrows to generative engines specifically, and to how a large language model chunks content, weights it and reassembles it into a generated answer. Most practitioners use AEO as the broader term and GEO for the part that deals with models, which is a defensible simplification. The distinction becomes concrete once you measure, because the numbers differ by engine and by brand. Across roughly 2,000 queries on the brands we monitor, the citation rate is 13 % overall, with Anthropic at 17 % and Perplexity at 11 %, and that ranking is not the same from one brand to the next.
Is AEO replacing SEO?
No, and the framing is misleading. Generative engines do not maintain their own independent index of the web. They rely on traditional search infrastructure to discover and retrieve sources, which means a page that is not crawlable, not indexed or blocked in robots.txt is invisible to both disciplines at once. What is changing is the share of attention: a growing part of buying research now happens inside an AI answer that names a handful of sources rather than inside a results page that lists ten. So SEO remains the foundation and keeps delivering clicks, while AEO decides whether you are one of the sources named when no click happens at all. Treating them as a sequence rather than a replacement is the accurate reading.
Which should I work on first, AEO or GEO?
Work on the technical foundation first, because all three disciplines depend on it and the fix is one-off. Then run the AEO editing pass on pages that already have impressions, since the content exists and restructuring it into self-contained answers costs little. Only then commit to GEO work, and measure before you do. The reason for that order is variance: across the brands we monitor, the strongest and weakest engines are not the same from one brand to the next. On our own site Anthropic is the weakest at 2 %, while it is the strongest across the brands we track. Any GEO plan copied from someone else's results starts from the wrong assumption about which engine is worth the effort.
How do you measure AEO and GEO results?
Measuring in positions is the most common mistake. The unit that matters is the share of relevant questions where your brand is actually named, measured per engine, and tracked over time. It has to be repeated, because model answers vary between runs on an identical prompt: a citation observed on a Tuesday can be gone by Thursday, so a single measurement is a photograph rather than a trend. A usable measurement therefore means dozens of prompts, several engines, and a schedule. Alongside the citation rate, two figures are worth watching: the accuracy with which your brand is described, and which competitor is named when you are absent. The second one is usually the most uncomfortable and the most actionable.
Do AEO and GEO work for French-speaking markets?
They work, but the economics differ. We measured 19 GEO keywords in France with DataForSEO on 20 September 2026 and only one had measurable volume: "aeo", at 1,900 searches a month. Terms like "agence geo", "consultant geo" and "outil geo" returned no measurable volume at all. Their English equivalents did, measured the same day: "geo agency" at 720 searches a month, "geo tools" at 720, "generative engine optimization tools" at 720 and "ai visibility tool" at 1,600. The practical consequence is that French-language AEO and GEO work should not be justified by search volume, because there is very little to capture. It should be justified by citation, where volume does not enter the equation: an AI engine answering a question in French still has to name someone, and the competition for that mention is far thinner than in English.
