AEO vs GEO vs AI SEO: what's the difference? (2026)

AEO (answer engine optimisation) gets your page lifted as the direct answer, in a featured snippet, a People Also Ask box or Google's AI Overviews. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your brand named and cited when ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode write an answer from many sources. AI SEO is the umbrella over both. LLMO is GEO by another name. In practice it's one job with two halves: AEO happens on your own pages, while GEO depends mostly on what other sites say about you. Both sit on ordinary SEO.

I'm Brenden House, and I run Searchmaxxed, an SEO and AI SEO agency. On 27 October 2026 (AEST) I read the pages ranking for "aeo vs geo" and the documentation Google and OpenAI publish. Then I set them against what we've measured in AI answers ourselves.

In summary

• AEO makes a page easy to quote: answer-first copy, question headings, tables and structured data that matches the text.
• GEO makes a brand easy to recommend through mentions, reviews, comparison lists, digital PR and original research on sites the models already trust.
• AI SEO, LLMO and AIO are other names for the same work. Judge providers by monthly output.
• Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need nothing beyond SEO, so a weak SEO base caps both.
• Leading marketing or growth at a B2B SaaS, manufacturing, venture-backed or public-sector organisation? Buy one scope that covers all three.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

AEO targets the extracted answer; GEO targets the generated one. An answer engine lifts a passage from one page and shows it. A generative engine reads many sources, writes its own reply, and names a handful of brands and pages along the way.

That changes where the work happens. To win an extracted answer, the page must state the answer cleanly, near the top, under a heading that matches the question. A generated answer is different. The model needs to have read about you in enough places to trust you, then find you when it searches.

Picture one buyer, two questions. A finance lead types "what is three-way matching" into Google, and the AI Overview quotes a clean definition from somebody's page. That's AEO.

A month later she asks ChatGPT which accounts payable software suits a 300-person company. It runs several searches. Then it reads review sites, comparison articles and vendor pages before naming four products. That's GEO.

At Searchmaxxed we treat them as one brief, because the same buyer asks both kinds of question in the same month. Our AEO service covers the answer pages and the outside sources together.

What do AEO, GEO, AI SEO and LLMO mean?

They're four names for optimising a business for AI-written answers, and each leans on a different part of the job. Plain definitions first.

• SEO (search engine optimisation) gets your pages crawled, indexed and ranked in Google and Bing.
• AEO (answer engine optimisation) structures your pages so an engine can lift a direct answer, and grew out of featured snippets and voice search.
• GEO (generative engine optimisation) makes your brand and pages the ones AI models cite and recommend when they write an answer.
• AI SEO is the umbrella name for all of it, covering classic results and AI answers together.
• LLMO (large language model optimisation) is GEO renamed.
• AIO means AI optimisation. Sometimes it means Google's AI Overviews, so ask which one a vendor means.
• A citation is an AI answer's linked source.
• Query fan-out is an AI tool splitting your question into several smaller searches, then reading the results.

GEO has a precise origin. A paper titled "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" coined it in November 2023. It was accepted to KDD 2024, and its authors reported their methods could "boost visibility by up to 40%" in generative engine responses. Treat that as a lab benchmark, and no forecast for your site.

AEO is older and looser. It came from the featured-snippet and voice-assistant years, so people still tie it to Google's answer boxes, though most vendors stretch it to ChatGPT now. One AI visibility vendor argues AEO and GEO are "the same thing", preferring AEO partly because "GEO" collides with geography. Ahrefs went further: "GEO, LLMO, AEO… It's All Just SEO".

Both are half right, I think. The names overlap almost completely. The work, though, splits cleanly into on-site and off-site, and that split is what you should plan around.

Is AI SEO the same as GEO?

Mostly, yes. AI SEO is the broader label, covering AEO, GEO, LLMO and the SEO underneath. When a provider sells "AI SEO", ask whether it includes off-site work, because that's the part that makes it GEO.

The labels follow the buyer. Similarweb reported that global searches for "Generative Engine Optimization" reached 54.3K in January 2026, against 30K for "Answer Engine Optimization" (Similarweb, February 2026). Marketers search GEO more. Many tool vendors still brand themselves AEO.

We use every one of these words at Searchmaxxed, because buyers search every one of them. Our GEO service and our AEO service describe the same managed work from two angles.

Is AEO or GEO better than SEO?

Neither replaces SEO; both depend on it. Google's guidance on AI features is blunt. "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary" (Google Search Central, updated 10 December 2025).

The same page lists what does matter, and it reads like an SEO checklist:

To appear as a supporting link, Google says a page must be "indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". It also says you "don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup". So an llms.txt file won't get you into AI Overviews.

ChatGPT has its own gate. OpenAI says sites that opt out of its OAI-SearchBot crawler "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers" (OpenAI crawler documentation). A firewall or CDN bot rule can block that crawler without anyone in marketing knowing. Check it before anyone writes a single AEO page.

AI search is also crowded, as our own keyword data shows:

"GEO is a blue ocean" is wrong. In our 13 October keyword capture, Australian AI-topic keywords had a median difficulty of 55, against 29 for everything else, and 82% already showed an AI Overview.

So the searches where AI answers appear most are often the hardest to rank for, and the ranking site still feeds the answer. For the longer argument, read GEO vs SEO.

Where do AEO and GEO actually differ in the work?

AEO work happens on pages you control and ships on your schedule. GEO work happens on other people's sites. Nobody controls that timing, which is why GEO takes more effort and longer to show.

Our own testing shows why.

We put 300 Australian agency-buyer questions to ChatGPT three times each, with search on. It pulled 17,870 search results into those 900 answers and kept 4,389 as sources. Being found is the easy part. About three in four results it reads never make the answer.

The sources it keeps cluster tightly:

Across 900 ChatGPT answers about Australian agencies, a single third-party "best agencies" site was cited in 168 of them. The next three were a second listicle, Semrush's agency directory and Clutch. If you want to be recommended, the job is getting onto the handful of pages the model already trusts.

And each engine leans on different sources:

Perplexity cited a review directory (Semrush Agencies, Clutch, DesignRush and the like) in 36 of 44 agency answers. ChatGPT did it in 20 and Claude in 15. One agency's Clutch profile had six reviews and was cited 20 times.

Those panels covered agencies, on single days in late September and early October 2026. Read them as snapshots. The pattern carries to software, industrial suppliers and services all the same. A tidy answer page gets you read, but being named depends on the lists, reviews and articles each engine trusts for your category.

What does AEO vs GEO look like for an enterprise or B2B team?

It depends on what your buyers ask. "Which vendor?" questions lean on GEO, because the answer comes from lists and reviews across the web. "How does it work?" questions lean on AEO. Here's how that plays out for the kinds of companies we build for; these are illustrations, not client results.

Take a spend-management SaaS company. Its AEO list runs to a few dozen answer pages: how three-way matching works, each integration, each pricing model. Content and web ship those this quarter.

Its GEO list is a different animal. Which review sites and "best spend management software" articles does ChatGPT cite, is the company on them, and do they describe it correctly? PR and product marketing own it. It moves on editors' timelines.

Public sector runs the other way round, and the bigger lever flips to AEO. An agency rarely needs to be recommended over anyone. It needs AI answers to state its rules correctly, which is mostly AEO: clear pages, current facts and structured data that matches each page.

Which team in your company should own AEO and GEO?

One person should own the outcome. The work crosses three teams, though: AEO usually lands with content and web, GEO with PR and brand, and measurement with analytics. Split ownership is why so many AI search projects stall after the first audit.

• Content: answer-first pages, question headings, FAQs, comparison pages.
• Web or engineering: crawler access, rendering, schema, internal links, page speed.
• PR, comms and product marketing: digital PR, analyst and media mentions, review sites, partner pages.
• Analytics: a fixed set of buyer questions tested monthly, plus enquiries and pipeline by landing page.

Searchmaxxed is set up for exactly this. One team builds the website and ships weekly search work across Google and AI answers, with links and digital PR in the same plan. You keep one owner.

How do you measure AEO and GEO?

Measure AEO by whether your passages appear in answer features. Measure GEO by how often AI answers name you across a fixed set of buyer questions. Then judge both by enquiries and pipeline, since visibility on its own pays for nothing.

Be careful with AI traffic charts. Here's what we found on an enterprise B2B client's account:

A client's GA4 showed AI-assistant visits jump from 354 to 6,050 in a month. Almost none of it was real. About 5,700 came in three one-hour bursts: same 1920x1080 desktop Chrome, all new users, no referrer, about 20 seconds each, landing on two pages. Real AI traffic was 385 sessions against 354 the month before, roughly flat.

A report built on that chart would have claimed a seventeenfold GEO win. AI answers also shift between runs. Judge a quarter of results. If you'd rather track answers in-house, our guide to AI visibility tools compares the software.

Should you hire an AEO agency or a GEO agency?

Hire for the scope. The label barely matters. A provider that only rewrites your pages is selling AEO, and one that only tracks mentions is selling a report. You need pages changed, outside sources built and results measured every month.

Put these to every provider, in writing:

1. Which AI tools do you test by name: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Claude, AI Overviews, AI Mode?
2. How many buyer questions do you track, and can I see the raw answers?
3. Pages built or rebuilt each month?
4. What do you do off our site each month, whether links, digital PR or research?
5. Who edits our website?
6. If we leave, do we keep the pages, content, tracking history and data?
7. How do you report enquiries and pipeline, and how do you filter out bot traffic from AI referrals?

Then run a live test. Ask each provider to put three of your buyer questions into ChatGPT and Google today and say what they'd change first. To try it yourself, how to rank in ChatGPT walks through the method.

Where does Searchmaxxed fit?

Searchmaxxed is an SEO and AI SEO agency for enterprise, B2B SaaS, venture-backed, manufacturing and public-sector companies. We do technical SEO, content, link building, digital PR, AEO, GEO and LLM SEO in one plan. The result you want: rank in Google and get named by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI answers, for the searches that bring pipeline.

AEO and GEO sit inside every managed package. What differs is page output and off-site scope. A page release means an approved new page or a substantial rebuild of one.

Every managed package includes continuous audits, a 90-day plan in weekly releases, the build work and a monthly decision memo. You own the site, repository, content and data from day one. Terms are monthly, six-month or 12-month. Want a diagnosis first? The AI SEO Audit takes five business days.

Here's how we run it. We build on a website you own, our Agentic Website. AI agents pull your Search Console and GA4 data, read the Google results and check what AI answers say about you and your competitors. The Managed Search Loop turns that data into the page, fix or link most likely to bring enquiries next. We build it, check the live page and measure what changed. Off your site, the Off-Page Source Layer builds the links, digital PR and mentions AI answers draw on.

SEO is still the foundation, and I learned it by hand.

Before Searchmaxxed, I built Radiant Roof Repairs from zero to more than A$1 million a year in revenue using SEO as the only marketing channel. Three high-intent Gold Coast roofing searches reached number one within 90 days. I did the pages, research, competitor checks and updates manually.

That was SEO, in my own business. Searchmaxxed's work has generated more than A$10 million in revenue through search for its clients.

Is Searchmaxxed right for you?

Searchmaxxed suits marketing and growth leaders who want AEO, GEO and SEO run as one piece of work, with output they can count. It's a poor fit if you want software only, or one fix and nothing after.

In the right-hand column? A tool or a smaller project will serve you better.

Frequently asked questions

What should you do next?

Write down five questions your best buyers would ask ChatGPT: three "which vendor" questions and two "how does it work" ones. Run them in ChatGPT and Google. Note who gets named and quoted. If you'd like us to scope AEO and GEO for your company, let's talk pricing.