SEO vs GEO vs AEO: what's the difference, and which one you need
By Roshan, founder of SearchMaxx - - updated - 6 min read
SEO is the work of getting your pages ranked in search engines like Google. GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization) are two names for the work of getting your company cited or named inside AI answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews. Most of the work is shared, so a software company with limited time should do the SEO basics first and then add the few things AI answers reward on top.
Where the terms came from
SEO is the old one. Google's own SEO starter guide defines it as being "about helping search engines understand your content". The goal is a high position in a list of ten blue links, and a click.
GEO has a clear origin. It comes from a research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, with authors from Princeton and IIT Delhi. It was first posted in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024. The authors call GEO "the first novel paradigm to aid content creators in improving their content visibility in generative engine responses".
The paper is worth knowing because it measured things. The authors built a benchmark of 10,000 queries and tested ways of rewriting a source page to see which ones made AI answers use it more. From the full paper:
- Adding quotations from relevant sources did best, about 41% better than the unchanged page on their main visibility measure.
- Adding statistics came next, at about 31%.
- Citing sources came third, at about 27%.
- Keyword stuffing did worse than doing nothing.
They also ran the tests on Perplexity, a live AI search engine, and saw the same pattern. Adding quotations improved visibility there by 22%.
AEO, answer engine optimization, has no founding paper that we could find. Today people use it to mean roughly the same thing as GEO, with the stress on pages that give short, direct answers an AI can lift. If someone tells you AEO and GEO are different disciplines, ask them what they would do differently. Usually the answer is nothing.
Side by side
| Factor | SEO | GEO | AEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank high in search results and get the click | Get cited or named inside AI-generated answers | Same as GEO, framed around direct answers |
| Where you show up | Google and Bing result pages | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode | Same as GEO |
| How success is measured | Clicks, impressions and positions in Search Console; organic traffic | How often AI answers name or cite you for the questions buyers ask; referral visits from AI tools | Same as GEO |
| Main tactics | Crawlable pages, titles and descriptions, useful content, links from other sites | Everything in SEO, plus pages with clear answers, statistics, quotes and sources; being mentioned on sites AI tools cite; letting AI crawlers in | Same as GEO, with extra weight on question-and-answer formatting |
| Origin | 1990s web search | 2023 research paper | Industry usage, no single source |
How much they overlap
More than the new names suggest. Three facts make the case.
Google says AI Overviews need nothing extra. In its guide to AI features, Google writes: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." A page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet. Google adds that you do not need "new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" and that "there's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add." For Google, GEO is SEO.
AI answers are built from search results. Google's AI features use "query fan-out", running several related searches and then building an answer from the results. Perplexity's own help center says it searches the web for each question and that each response "includes citations and links to original sources." If you are not findable in search, you are not in the pool these tools pick from.
The crawlers are different, and that is where they split. Google's AI features use the normal Googlebot. ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity use their own crawlers, and Vercel's crawler study found none of those crawlers run JavaScript. A site can rank fine in Google and still look empty to ChatGPT. We cover the fix in AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, and which bots to allow in our robots.txt guide.
So the real differences are small and specific:
- Who can read your site. SEO only needs Googlebot and Bingbot. GEO needs
OAI-SearchBot,Claude-SearchBotandPerplexityBottoo, and those need your text in the HTML without JavaScript. - What counts as a win. SEO wins a click. GEO often wins a mention with no click. Pew Research tracked 900 US adults in March 2025 and found people clicked a regular result on 8% of visits to a Google page with an AI summary, against 15% without one. They clicked a link inside the summary on 1% of visits. Being the name in the answer matters more when fewer people click.
- What content gets used. The GEO paper suggests pages with numbers, quotes and named sources get used more. That is also good writing for SEO, but GEO makes it a requirement rather than a nice extra.
- Where else you need to appear. AI answers are assembled from pages across the web, not only yours. Each comparison post, directory listing or community thread that names you is one more page an AI tool can find you on. For SEO those pages mostly matter as links. For GEO the mention itself counts.
How to measure each one
SEO has mature, free measurement. Google Search Console shows clicks, impressions and average position for every query.
GEO and AEO do not have an equivalent yet. Google says pages shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode are "included in the overall search traffic in Search Console", under the Web search type, so you cannot separate them there. For ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity there is no console at all. The practical method:
- Write down 20 to 50 questions a buyer asks before choosing a product like yours, such as "best invoicing tool for agencies".
- Ask each one in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google, every week, in a fresh session.
- Record whether you are named, whether you are cited with a link, and which competitors appear.
- Watch referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and claude.ai in your analytics.
Answers vary from run to run, so track the trend over weeks, not a single result.
Which one you need
| Your situation | What to do first |
|---|---|
| New site, little or no Google traffic | SEO basics: crawlable pages, a sitemap, titles and descriptions, a few pages that answer real buyer questions. This is also most of GEO. |
| Ranks in Google, never named by ChatGPT or Perplexity | GEO checks: test your pages without JavaScript, check robots.txt and your firewall for AI crawlers, add numbers and sources to your key pages. |
| Strong in both, losing to competitors in AI answers | Get mentioned on the sites AI tools cite for your category: comparison pages, directories, and community threads. |
| Very limited time, maybe two hours a week | One page a week that answers one buyer question better than anything else on the web, with a table, numbers and sources. It serves SEO, GEO and AEO at once. |
Verdict
For a software company with limited time, treat SEO, GEO and AEO as one job with two extra checks.
Do the SEO basics, because Google's AI features run on them and the other AI tools search the web too. Then make sure AI crawlers can actually read your pages, and write pages that state facts with numbers and sources. Skip anyone selling AEO as a separate program with separate deliverables. The overlap is too large to pay for twice.
If you want to see where your site stands, our free check tests whether AI crawlers can reach and read your pages in about 10 seconds. If you are choosing which AI tools to focus on, ChatGPT vs Perplexity vs Google AI Overviews covers how each one finds and cites sources.
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