AEO, GEO and SEO

The short answer

SEO gets a page ranked. AEO and GEO get a company named. Traditional search returns a list of links and your job is to be high in it. An AI engine returns a short answer naming a handful of businesses, and your job is to be one of them. There is no second page to be on.

AEO and GEO are interchangeable. Generative engine optimisation is the term used in the academic work on the subject; answer engine optimisation is the term the industry adopted. They describe one practice. A vendor selling them as two services is selling the same thing twice.

What the research actually found

The most-cited study on this is a 2024 paper presented at KDD, which tested nine optimisation methods against a generative engine and measured the change in how often a source was cited. The findings that survived testing were unglamorous: citing sources and adding specific statistics produced the largest gains, and expert quotation followed. Keyword stuffing — the one tactic borrowed wholesale from early SEO — measurably reduced visibility.

That last result is the useful one. It means AEO is not SEO with new jargon. The techniques that worked on a ranking algorithm actively work against a model deciding whether a source is worth quoting.

Where most of the work happens

Brands are roughly six and a half times more likely to be cited through third-party sources than through their own domain. In restricted categories the gap is wider still, because engines lean harder on sources they read as independent when the subject is sensitive.

This is the part that makes AEO uncomfortable to sell. Most of the work is not on your website, which means most of it is not a deliverable you can look at. It is placement in roundups and comparison pages, presence on review platforms, participation in the communities an engine reads, and the dull entity work of making one company resolve to one node rather than four.

What nobody can honestly claim

No engine publishes how it selects sources. Everything stated about AEO by anyone, this page included, is observed correlation from repeated measurement of outputs. The field is about eighteen months old and the systems change without announcement.

So: no guaranteed placements, no confirmed ranking factors, and any provider quoting either is describing a relationship with an AI company that they do not have. What can honestly be offered is measurement that is reproducible, work aimed at the sources the measurement shows are being cited, and a report that says so when the number goes down.