What is GEO and AEO?
Two new acronyms describe the same shift: getting your content into AI-generated answers instead of only a list of blue links.
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Check your AI visibility →What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your website more likely to be cited, quoted or summarized inside answers written by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. Instead of competing for a ranking position, you compete to be a source the model trusts and reuses.
Generative engines read many pages, pull out facts, and write one synthesized answer. GEO is about making your facts easy to lift: stated plainly, backed by evidence, and placed where the model can find them.
What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
Answer engine optimization (AEO) is optimizing your content to become the direct answer to a question, in featured snippets, voice assistants and AI answers. It predates GEO and overlaps heavily with it. In practice most people use AEO and GEO interchangeably, both point at being the answer rather than a link.
The difference is emphasis. AEO grew from featured snippets and voice search, GEO from large language models. The tactics converge: answer the question first, be specific, and make the page trustworthy.
Why does this matter now?
It matters because a growing share of searches end without a click. When an AI answer is good enough, the user never visits a website. If your page is the cited source you still get visibility and traffic, if it is not, you become invisible even while ranking well in classic search. GEO protects that visibility.
This does not replace SEO. It sits next to it. A page that is crawlable, clear and authoritative tends to do well in both classic results and AI answers.
The core of GEO in four points
GEO comes down to four things: be crawlable by AI bots, write answer-first so a model can lift a clean summary, back claims with clear facts and structure, and build authority so models trust you. Nail these and you improve your odds across every generative engine at once.
- Crawlable: allow AI crawlers and keep content in the HTML, not hidden behind JavaScript.
- Answer-first: a short, self-contained answer under each heading.
- Evidence: specific facts, sources, dates and structured data.
- Authority: be mentioned and linked across the web.
See your AI-visibility score
Run a free scan and see how visible your site is to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI, as one of four subscores.
Check your AI visibility →