What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO and AEO?

15 October 2026 · By John Carlsson

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: work aimed at getting your content used and cited in answers written by AI systems. AEO, answer engine optimisation, is a similar industry label. Neither is a Google term for a separate discipline. Google's own guidance says optimising for generative AI search is still SEO, built on the same foundations.

The three terms in plain English

SEO is search engine optimisation. Google's SEO Starter Guide describes it as helping search engines understand your content, and helping people find your site and decide whether to visit it from a search engine.

AEO is answer engine optimisation. GEO is generative engine optimisation. Both are industry labels for trying to get your content picked up, quoted or cited when an AI system writes an answer, rather than only ranking as a blue link.

The labels overlap heavily. AEO is often used for direct answers in general, and GEO for answers written by large language models, but there is no official standard behind either term.

What Google says about AEO and GEO

Google addressed the terms directly in its guide to optimising for generative AI features, added in May 2026. It recognises that AEO means answer engine optimisation and GEO means generative engine optimisation, and then states its position: optimising for generative AI search is optimising for the search experience, so it is still SEO.

The reasoning given is technical. Google's AI features are built on its core Search ranking and quality systems. They use two techniques Google names in the guide:

Grounding (retrieval augmented generation), which pulls relevant pages from the Search index.
Query fan-out, which runs related searches to gather more results.

Both depend on your pages already being in the index and judged useful. That is ordinary SEO.

What is actually required to appear in Google's AI features

Google's AI features page says there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. To be eligible as a supporting link, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. Google also notes that indexing and serving are not guaranteed.

The same page and the optimisation guide list the fundamentals that still matter:

Allow crawling in robots.txt, and check your CDN or host is not blocking Googlebot.
Use internal links so pages are easy to find.
Keep important content in text form.
Keep structured data consistent with the visible text.
Keep Merchant Center and Business Profile information current if you sell products or serve a local area.
Make sure your site is included in Search generative AI features in Search Console settings.

GEO advice Google calls a myth

The optimisation guide lists several popular tactics and says they are not needed for Google:

llms.txt and other AI text files: Google Search ignores them, so they neither help nor harm your visibility.
Chunking content into tiny pieces: there is no requirement to do this and no ideal page length.
Rewriting in a special style for AI: Google says its systems understand synonyms and general meaning.
Special schema: structured data is not required for generative AI search, though it still matters for rich results.
Chasing inauthentic mentions across the web: Google says this is not as helpful as it might seem.

Google also warns that creating pages mainly to manipulate rankings or AI responses breaches its scaled content abuse spam policy, and that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems. If you are paying for a GEO or AEO service, check its advice against Google's own documentation.

Where the difference is real

Google is not the only answer engine. ChatGPT, Perplexity and others run their own crawlers with their own robots.txt user agents, such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. Making sure those crawlers are allowed is a genuine extra step that classic Google SEO does not cover. Beyond crawler access, the content advice is the same: original, useful, people-first pages that a crawler can read.

If you want a second look at a page from an answer engine point of view, the AEO Checker on this site is one option. It does not replace testing your own questions in the AI tools themselves.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a separate GEO strategy for Google?

Not according to Google. Its guide to generative AI features says the existing SEO best practices still apply, because AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on the core Search ranking and quality systems. There are no additional technical requirements beyond being indexed and eligible to show a snippet. Spend your time on useful, original content and a site Google can crawl.

Should I add llms.txt or special schema for GEO?

Not for Google. Google says you do not need new machine readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown to appear in Google Search, and that there is no special schema.org markup for generative AI search. Structured data is still worth adding where it makes you eligible for rich results. Other services may use llms.txt, and Google says keeping one will neither help nor harm you in Google Search.