GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. In practice it means the same thing as AEO: getting your business named and cited in answers generated by AI systems rather than only ranked in a list of links.
GEO, AEO and AI SEO are three names for one job
This is the honest answer and it saves people a lot of confusion. GEO emphasises the generating, AEO emphasises the answering, AI SEO is the plainest of the three. Different people picked different words at roughly the same time and none of them has won.
If a supplier tells you GEO is a distinct discipline from AEO requiring separate budgets, ask them to describe a task that belongs to one and not the other. The answers tend to be thin.
The one confusion worth avoiding
GEO has an older, completely unrelated meaning in this field: geographic or local SEO, as in ranking in a particular town. If somebody offers you GEO services, it is worth thirty seconds to establish which of the two they mean, because the work has nothing in common.
What it involves in practice
Rank well for the query first, because generated answers draw heavily on pages that already rank. Structure content so a specific question is answered directly and early. Make sure the crawlers that feed these systems can actually reach you. Build presence on the sources those systems already cite, because that is often where they learn a business exists.
And measure it. Whether an assistant names you is not visible from any ranking report; it has to be asked and recorded.
Why the words matter less than the measurement
The vocabulary will settle eventually and one of these three terms will win. It does not much matter which. What matters is that you can answer a simple question about your own business: when a customer asks an assistant about your market, are you in the answer?
Almost nobody can answer that, and it is a question with a factual answer.
Where this shows up in the tracker
Every term in this glossary is something the product actually measures or acts on. Plans start at £29 a month, with rank tracking, AI visibility, the daily AI readiness scan, security and domain health, Search Console, backlinks and audits on every one of them.
Related terms
AEO
AEO stands for answer engine optimisation. It is the work of getting your business named and cited when an AI system answers a question, rather than merely ranking on a page of links. The name is new; a good deal of the work is not.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed standard: a plain-text file at the root of your website that gives AI systems a clean, structured summary of what the site contains and where the important pages are. It is a convention, not a rule, and support for it is not universal.
AI Overview
An AI Overview is the AI-generated answer Google places above the ordinary search results for many queries. It answers the question on the results page, citing a handful of sources, which means a share of searchers never click through to any website at all.
Mention rate
Mention rate is the share of AI answers, on a set of questions you choose, in which your business is named. Measured over time and across platforms, it is the closest thing AI search has to a ranking.