What Is GEO and AEO? A Practical Guide
Plain-English Guide
GEO, AEO, LLM SEO — what actually changed?
✓ Performance-based — no visibility lift, no fee
Buyers increasingly get an answer instead of a list of links. That single shift is why a new vocabulary appeared. Here is what the terms mean, how they relate to the SEO you already do, and what genuinely needs to change in your work.
✓ 20+ AI answer engines
✓ Pay only on results
The vocabulary
Three terms, one underlying shift
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization
Making your brand more likely to be retrieved and named when a generative engine composes an answer. The unit of success is a mention inside the answer, not a ranked link beside it.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimization
Largely the same objective, framed around answer surfaces: AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice results. In practice most teams use GEO and AEO interchangeably.
LLM SEO
The same idea named after the underlying model. Useful when the conversation is specifically about how large language models select and cite sources.
The honest comparison
GEO vs SEO: what carries over, what does not
Traditional SEO work is not wasted. Crawlability, authority and content quality still matter, because AI systems draw heavily on the same web. But three things behave differently.
Rank → Mention
Position 1 does not guarantee being named in the answer. We repeatedly see pages cited as a source while the brand is never mentioned in the text the user reads.
Keywords → Entities
Models reason about entities and their attributes. Consistent naming, structured data and corroboration across independent sources matter more than keyword placement.
Your site → The wider corpus
What third-party sources say about you often carries more weight than your own pages. Much of GEO work happens off your domain.
Where to start
Four things worth doing first
Get a baseline
Ask the questions your buyers ask, across several engines, and record what comes back. Without a baseline you cannot tell whether anything you do later works.
Fix entity consistency
One canonical brand name, one description, consistent structured data. Ambiguity makes you harder to retrieve reliably.
Audit your source footprint
Identify the publications and pages AI systems already lean on when explaining your category, and find which of them never mention you.
Measure mentions, not just traffic
Many AI answers never produce a click. If your only metric is sessions, you will conclude nothing is happening while competitors get named daily.
Free baseline report
Want to see where your brand currently stands?
We will run your category questions across the major AI engines and send you the baseline — which engines mention you, which name a competitor first, and which sources they cite.
