What Are GEO and AEO? How Do They Differ From SEO?
By Jordan Baker, Founder of Fair Public Relations and former UK national journalist
Over the past few months, GEO and AEO have gone from fairly niche marketing terms to things prospective clients are actively asking us about.
That creates a slightly ridiculous situation for a small-business owner. For years, they have been told they need SEO. Now they are being told they need AEO. Then somebody tells them that GEO is the future. Another agency may use all three terms slightly differently.
It is understandable if the response is: has SEO been replaced twice without anybody telling me?
The short answer is no.
SEO, AEO and GEO overlap significantly, and there is no universally agreed technical boundary separating all three. But I also do not think GEO is merely a fashionable new acronym for exactly the same work we were doing ten years ago.
The way people discover businesses is genuinely changing.
Somebody looking for a PR agency, accountant, therapist, software provider or hotel might once have searched Google, opened five websites and compared them manually. Today, they may ask ChatGPT to recommend three providers that meet a specific set of requirements, use an AI Overview on Google, continue a conversation in AI Mode or ask another assistant to compare their options.
That is a materially different discovery experience.
So although many of the foundations are shared with traditional search optimisation, I think businesses now have a new question to consider: how clearly can search engines and AI systems discover, understand, retrieve and accurately represent our business?
That is where GEO and AEO become useful concepts.
What is SEO, and what is it supposed to achieve?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation.
At its broadest, it is the work involved in making a website accessible, understandable, useful and competitive within search engines.
That includes technical work such as making sure pages can be crawled and indexed. It includes site structure, internal linking, page titles and understanding search intent. It includes publishing genuinely useful material. It can include external references and links from other websites. And it includes measuring whether the right people are actually finding the site.
SEO is sometimes reduced to "ranking number one on Google", but that is too simplistic.
A business can receive thousands of impressions and hardly any clicks.
It can rank first for something nobody likely to become a customer searches.
It can attract large amounts of traffic to an informational article while its commercial pages remain almost invisible.
Good SEO should ultimately help the right business become discoverable by the right people for the right reasons.
That underlying principle has not disappeared because generative AI has arrived.
In fact, Google is unusually explicit about this. Its current guidance says SEO best practices remain foundational to its generative AI experiences. Google's AI features use its Search infrastructure and can use techniques including retrieval-augmented generation and query fan-out to retrieve relevant material. From Google's own perspective, work described as AEO or GEO is still part of optimising for the wider search experience.
That is important context before somebody sells you the idea that everything you previously knew about search should be discarded.
What is AEO?
AEO normally stands for Answer Engine Optimisation.
The phrase predates the current explosion in generative AI.
For years, search engines have tried to answer some questions directly rather than simply displaying a list of websites. Featured snippets are an obvious example. Voice assistants also created a need for systems to identify clear answers to questions such as "How long should I cook this?" or "What time does this business close?"
The AEO idea was therefore relatively straightforward: make useful information sufficiently clear, accurate and accessible that an answer engine can understand and potentially surface it.
Today, marketers increasingly use AEO more broadly to include AI-generated answers.
That creates overlap with GEO.
Practical AEO work might include providing a clear answer to an important question, structuring complex information sensibly, making basic business facts easy to understand and ensuring the answer is supported by genuinely useful information.
What it does not mean is adding forty FAQs to every page because somebody has told you that question headings are an AI-ranking hack.
An FAQ can be extremely useful when it answers real questions.
It is not magic markup.
Google has gone so far as to say there is no requirement to split content into tiny "AI-friendly" chunks, rewrite pages solely for AI or add special structured data to appear in its generative search features.
That is a useful reminder that clear writing and artificial optimisation are not the same thing.
What is GEO?
GEO normally stands for Generative Engine Optimisation.
The term became much more prominent after researchers formalised it in a 2023 academic paper looking at how content visibility might be improved within generative search responses.
The researchers were dealing with a new problem.
Traditional search engines return ranked results.
Generative systems may instead retrieve information from several places, synthesise it and give the user an answer directly.
The creator of the underlying source can therefore face a very different visibility challenge.
The original GEO research tested different content strategies within an experimental framework and reported substantial visibility changes in some circumstances. But those results should not be turned into a promise that applying one technique to a commercial website will generate the same outcome in ChatGPT, Google or another live system. The authors themselves found that effectiveness varied by subject area, and modern generative systems continue to evolve.
For a business owner, I think GEO is easier to understand when you stop treating it as a mysterious algorithm and ask a practical question:
When an AI system is helping somebody research my market, what public information exists that allows it to understand where my business fits?
That information may come from your own website.
It may come from independent journalism.
It could come from recognised directories, reviews, public data, professional profiles or other sources.
And different AI systems may retrieve and use that information differently.
Is GEO really new, or is it just SEO with another name?
Personally, I think it is genuinely new.
That does not mean the underlying principles were invented yesterday.
Clear websites existed before ChatGPT.
Good content existed before ChatGPT.
Public relations existed before ChatGPT.
Search engines have been evaluating and retrieving information for decades.
But the way information is being consumed and synthesised is new enough that I think it warrants new thinking.
A business previously spent most of its search effort worrying about whether a potential customer could find its page.
Now it may also care whether an AI assistant understands what that business does well enough to include it in an answer, mention it accurately, use one of its pages as supporting evidence or recommend it as an appropriate provider.
Those are new practical objectives.
OpenAI, for example, says any public website can potentially appear in ChatGPT Search, but website owners that want their material available for summaries, citations and links should make sure they are not blocking OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI also states that placement is not guaranteed.
So when I talk about making a website "readable by ChatGPT", I do not mean inserting a secret ChatGPT code into your homepage.
I mean making sure that the site is technically accessible where appropriate, its public information is clear, its positioning is consistent and there is enough useful material available for an external system to understand it.
That is a genuinely newer consideration for most small businesses.
GEO vs AEO vs SEO: what is the actual difference?
The boundaries blur, but this is how I would explain the three to a business owner.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main objective | Help pages become discoverable and competitive in search | Help information become usable in direct answers | Help a business/content become discoverable, understood and potentially surfaced in generative AI experiences |
| Typical experience | Search results, links, rich results and broader Search features | Featured/direct answers, voice and answer experiences | AI-generated answers, citations, brand mentions and recommendations |
| Website fundamentals | Critical | Important | Important |
| Technical accessibility | Critical | Important | Important |
| Clear factual information | Important | Very important | Very important |
| Original expertise | Useful | Useful | Potentially particularly valuable |
| Third-party media/PR | Can support wider authority and links | Can provide external evidence | Can create independent public information around expertise and positioning |
| Typical measurement | Rankings, impressions, clicks, traffic and conversions | Answer appearances and related search performance | Citations, mentions, recommendations, accuracy, AI referrals and commercial outcomes |
| Can a result be guaranteed? | No | No | No |
The table makes the concepts look tidier than real life.
In practice, one piece of work can support all three.
A detailed article based on genuine expertise might attract Google searches, answer a specific question clearly and become retrievable in an AI-generated response.
A piece of independent press coverage might generate an editorial backlink, strengthen a founder's public profile and create another externally accessible source associating that founder with a particular subject.
This is why I would be wary of agencies selling three completely disconnected programmes when the underlying business problem has not even been diagnosed.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No, in the sense that SEO has suddenly stopped mattering.
But my personal view on budget priorities is more aggressive than that answer might suggest.
If a small business came to me today with a technically sound website, decent basic SEO and a finite budget, I would be increasingly comfortable moving some of that budget towards GEO and wider AI visibility rather than simply pouring everything into conventional SEO.
Why?
Because in our own experience, GEO has sometimes produced commercially interesting signals remarkably quickly.
SEO can be a slow burn. It often takes considerable time for a new site to establish rankings and build meaningful organic traffic.
AI discovery can behave differently.
Fair PR's current website and SEO/GEO programme is still young. The present Fair website only dates from July 2026, and our more structured SEO/GEO work began around the middle of July. Yet within roughly three months we have already observed Fair being recommended by ChatGPT for commercial non-branded prompts, appearing in Google's generative search experiences and receiving identifiable ChatGPT traffic and enquiries.
That does not establish that GEO is universally faster than SEO.
It is one company's early experience.
But it is why I personally think this deserves budget now, rather than treating AI discovery as something businesses can revisit in five years.
Google's own position remains that its generative Search features are rooted in its Search systems and that foundational SEO is still essential.
I agree with the foundation.
I differ only in the commercial emphasis I would place on the newer opportunity.
I would not abandon your SEO foundations
There is an important qualification.
If Google cannot index your website properly, you have a problem.
If your website does not clearly explain what the company sells, you have a problem.
If important pages are inaccessible, badly structured or technically broken, you have a problem.
If you do not even have Search Console or Analytics configured, I would normally want those basics fixed.
I have previously had prospective PR clients where I have effectively said: before paying us, here are the things I would sort out first.
That is not me pretending to be a technical SEO agency.
It is recognising that PR is not an efficient way to repair a website that has no basic search foundation.
The sensible approach is foundation first, then visibility around it.
Why GEO can require different thinking from SEO
One of the biggest differences for me is the move away from obsessing over one keyword and one ranking position.
Traditional SEO reporting encouraged questions such as:
"Where do I rank for PR agency London?"
An AI buyer prompt might be:
"I'm a small UK healthcare company with a budget under £1,000 a month. Which PR agencies work with health experts and have transparent pricing?"
That is a much richer request.
The system has to interpret:
business size
industry
geography
budget
type of expertise
pricing
service fit
That is one reason we have become so interested in entity clarity and positioning on Fair's own website.
It is not enough for us to be vaguely associated with PR.
We want the public information about Fair to accurately connect us with concepts such as founder-led, journalist-led PR, small businesses, experts, earned media, transparent pricing, our actual markets and the sectors we genuinely serve.
That feels different from chasing one keyword at a time.
Where does PR fit into GEO and AEO?
PR sits outside the technical website layer.
Your website is what you say about yourself.
Earned media creates information that somebody else decided was worth publishing.
That does not mean a newspaper article is an official endorsement of your business.
Journalism is not a certification system.
But an independent journalist deciding that your founder is useful enough to quote, your survey interesting enough to report or your story relevant enough to feature is fundamentally different from you publishing another paragraph describing yourself as an authority.
For years, that distinction mattered because of human credibility.
I think it becomes particularly interesting when AI systems are also retrieving information from across the public web.
A strong earned-media programme might create independent pages associating:
your expert with a particular subject
your company with a particular market
your founder with a particular point of view
your product with a category
your research with an industry trend
That creates a broader public record.
I would not describe every press mention as an AI ranking factor. We simply do not have evidence to justify that claim.
The more defensible point is that good PR can create accurate, independent, publicly accessible information around the things a company wants to become known for.
For a deeper analysis of that specific relationship, our guide, Can PR Help Your Business Appear in ChatGPT and AI Search?, goes much further into earned media and AI discovery.
What should businesses actually prioritise?
I would start in a fairly boring place.
Make sure the website works.
Make sure important pages are available to the search and AI systems you want to reach.
Make sure the company is described clearly.
Make sure your market, services, locations and genuine areas of expertise are not contradictory from page to page.
Then create material worth retrieving.
That can include useful buyer guides, original research, first-hand professional insight, case studies and properly developed answers to real questions.
After that, look beyond the website.
Does anybody else credibly associate your company with the areas you claim expertise in?
Are journalists quoting you?
Are customers reviewing you in appropriate places?
Do respected industry sources refer to you?
Does a search for the founder produce a coherent public profile?
Then measure.
There is no benefit in spending months on "GEO" without checking whether anything is changing.
What GEO and AEO claims should businesses be sceptical about?
The first is guaranteed ChatGPT rankings.
ChatGPT does not have a simple public ranking position equivalent to traditional keyword tracking, and OpenAI explicitly says placement is not guaranteed.
The second is that every business needs special AI schema.
Google says no special schema.org markup is required for generative AI search. Structured data remains useful for the purposes it already serves, but it is not a secret GEO switch.
The third is that an `llms.txt` file will suddenly make a company rank in Google AI.
Google now explicitly states that it ignores `llms.txt` for Google Search and that creating one neither helps nor harms Google Search visibility. Other systems may use such files now or in the future, so that does not make the format universally pointless. It simply means it should not be sold as a proven Google GEO ranking mechanism.
I would also be cautious about mass-generating hundreds of thin pages simply to cover every conceivable AI query. Google continues to apply its spam policies to generative search and specifically warns against scaled low-value content and attempts to manipulate generative AI responses.
And finally, I would question anybody selling masses of manufactured third-party mentions purely because they believe an AI will count them. Google's own 2026 guidance specifically cautions against seeking inauthentic mentions for generative search.
The future may be new.
Spam is still spam.
Should a small business invest separately in SEO, AEO and GEO?
Not automatically.
Imagine a local business with the wrong address appearing across several public sources and a website that does not properly explain where it operates.
I would fix the information architecture and local/search fundamentals before commissioning some elaborate national PR campaign.
Imagine an ecommerce business whose products are barely indexable.
Again, solve the technical problem first.
Now imagine a B2B consultancy with an excellent website, strong technical SEO and highly experienced people, but virtually no independent online evidence that those people are recognised in their field.
PR may be extremely relevant.
Or imagine a recognised expert with years of press coverage but an old website that barely explains what they now sell.
That may require website and SEO work alongside PR.
The correct answer is rarely "buy GEO because GEO is new".
It is identify the visibility problem and then choose the work that actually addresses it.
So are GEO and AEO just marketing jargon?
No.
They are imperfect labels for a genuine change in how people discover and evaluate information.
The labels may evolve.
The boundaries will probably remain messy.
Google itself effectively subsumes AEO and GEO into modern SEO, while other parts of the industry use GEO to describe a distinct emerging practice. Microsoft now explicitly uses GEO language when discussing AI-search visibility and its new AI Performance tools.
I am comfortable holding both ideas at once.
The fundamentals overlap.
The user experience has changed.
And that change is significant enough that businesses should pay attention.
Frequently asked questions
What does GEO stand for?
GEO usually stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. It generally describes work intended to improve how content, organisations or brands appear in generative AI search and answer experiences.
What does AEO stand for?
AEO normally stands for Answer Engine Optimisation. It is generally associated with making information suitable for systems that provide direct answers, historically including featured snippets and voice search and increasingly including AI-generated answers.
Is GEO the same as SEO?
Not exactly, although they overlap significantly. Google considers optimisation for its generative Search features part of SEO, while the wider industry also uses GEO as a distinct term for AI-search visibility.
Can GEO work without SEO?
Some AI systems can obtain information from sources beyond your own website, but a technically accessible, clear and useful website remains an extremely sensible foundation. I would not use GEO as an excuse to ignore serious SEO problems.
Does AEO only mean voice search?
No. The term has broadened considerably and is now often used for direct-answer and AI-answer experiences as well.
Do I need special schema to appear in Google AI Overviews?
No. Google says there is no special schema required specifically for its generative AI features. Existing structured data should continue to be used correctly where it serves a legitimate Search purpose.
Will llms.txt make my business appear in ChatGPT?
There is no basis for promising that. Google says it ignores `llms.txt` for Google Search, while different AI services have their own approaches. For ChatGPT Search, OpenAI currently tells publishers to ensure OAI-SearchBot is not blocked if they want content eligible to be discovered and surfaced.
Can PR improve AI-search visibility?
Potentially. PR can create credible third-party information around a business and its expertise. What cannot be established in most cases is that one specific press article directly caused a later AI recommendation.
Should a small business hire a GEO agency?
Only after understanding what the agency actually does. "GEO" can describe technical SEO, content work, PR, entity management, analytics, specialist monitoring or combinations of all of them. Buy the activities that solve your problem rather than the label.
Building credible visibility beyond your own website?
At Fair Public Relations, our contribution to this picture is earned media.
We help credible experts, founders and businesses identify what they should genuinely become known for, turn their knowledge and stories into material journalists can use and build a stronger independent editorial profile around their work.
We are not a technical SEO agency and we do not sell guaranteed ChatGPT rankings.
But if your website already explains what you do and the missing piece is credible visibility beyond the channels you control, Expert Commentary PR or our wider Standard PR service may be relevant.
About the author
Jordan Baker is the founder of Fair Public Relations and a former UK national journalist with more than a decade of experience in journalism, PR and media relations. He writes about earned media, expert positioning, AI search, small-business PR and how changing discovery behaviour affects the way businesses build authority.
View Jordan Baker's media expert profile
