If you have been near SEO in the last year you have been offered AEO, GEO and AI SEO, probably as three separate services with three separate prices. Here is the short version, which will save you money.

They are three names for the same job

  • AEO, answer engine optimisation. Emphasises the answering.
  • GEO, generative engine optimisation. Emphasises the generating.
  • AI SEO. The plainest of the three, and the one most people understand without explanation.

All three describe getting your business named and cited when an AI system answers a question, instead of only ranking in a list of links. Different people picked different words at roughly the same moment and none has won yet.

A reasonable test for any supplier: ask them to describe a task belonging to AEO and not to GEO. The answers tend to be thin.

One genuine ambiguity to watch

GEO has an older, unrelated meaning in this industry: geographic or local SEO, as in ranking in a particular town. If somebody offers you GEO services, spend thirty seconds establishing which they mean. The two have nothing in common.

How much of it is actually new

Less than the volume of writing suggests. AI answers are assembled largely from pages that already rank, so classic SEO is the entry ticket rather than something that has been replaced. If you are not findable, you are not citable.

Two things are genuinely different, and they are worth your attention:

  • Structure matters more. Answers get assembled from content that can be lifted cleanly: a specific question answered directly, early, in its own section. A page that buries its answer can rank well and never be quoted.
  • Access is a hard precondition. A system that cannot fetch your page cannot cite it, and blocking the wrong crawler removes you from answers entirely. It is the most common single cause of being absent, and it is a setting rather than a strategy.

How to tell real from sold

Real practitioners talk about crawler access, page structure, being present on the sources that already get cited, and measuring whether any of it worked. They will tell you classic SEO still matters, because it does.

Be sceptical of anyone selling schema-only packages promising citation with no content behind them, of anyone claiming a guaranteed effect from adding a file, and of anyone who cannot show you a measurement. Whether an assistant names you is a factual question with a factual answer, and if a supplier cannot answer it for your business, they are guessing too.

Longer definitions, if you want them: AEO, GEO and llms.txt.