GEO vs AEO vs SEO: three labels, two jobs

The four labels, side by side

Term	What it optimises for	What success looks like	Where the term came from
SEO — search engine optimisation	Your pages’ position in a ranked list of results	A high position for a keyword	The original discipline
AEO — answer engine optimisation	Being the source an engine uses to answer a question directly	Named or cited in the answer	In use by February 2018, for voice search and direct answers
GEO — generative engine optimisation	Visibility inside answers written by generative AI	Cited, and quoted prominently	A research paper first posted in November 2023, published at KDD 2024
AI SEO	The same as AEO and GEO, in buyers’ words	As above	Marketing usage; the most-searched of the four phrases in Australia

Search volume shows which words Australians actually use: in Semrush’s Australian database, “AI SEO agency” and “AI SEO services” each draw about 880 searches a month, against about 390 for “AEO services”. The practitioners’ vocabulary and the buyers’ vocabulary have not converged, which is why the same work is sold under all of them. Agencies often hedge by using every label at once; one page an AI engine cited in our September 2026 run was titled “AI SEO, GEO, AEO Services”.

Where “GEO” came from

The term was introduced in a paper titled GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, first posted to arXiv on 16 November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024, a major data-mining conference. It is worth knowing what it actually tested, because it is the most-cited piece of evidence in this whole field.

The researchers built a benchmark of 10,000 queries and tested specific edits to source pages to see which made them more visible in generative engines’ answers. Their headline result: “GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses.” The methods that worked best were citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics, which achieved “a relative improvement of 30-40%” on their main measure. Keyword stuffing, the reflex from old SEO, offered “little to no improvement”.

The result that gets quoted less is the most useful one for smaller businesses. The gains were not evenly spread. Citing sources raised visibility by 115.1% for websites ranked fifth in the search results, while top-ranked sites lost 30.3% on average. These techniques help the underdog more than the incumbent.

Note what GEO, in the paper’s sense, does not cover: off-site work. It measured changes to the content of a page. The evidence that earned coverage, reviews and entity signals matter even more came later, from other studies, and is collected in what drives AI citations.

Where “AEO” came from

AEO is the older term. The earliest dated use we could verify is a February 2018 Search Engine Watch article about voice search, which says: “This strategy has come to be known as AEO, or answer engine optimization.” At the time an “answer engine” meant a voice assistant or Google’s featured snippet box: one answer, read aloud or shown above the results. Generative AI stretched the term to cover written answers that cite several sources, and that is the sense in which it is mostly used now.

What Google says about all of this

Google has addressed the labels by name. Its guide to generative AI features in Search, announced in May 2026 as a way of “mythbusting common ‘AEO/GEO’ misconceptions”, concludes: “From Google Search’s perspective, optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO.” It adds that Google Search does not use AI text files such as llms.txt, needs no special schema, and has “no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces”.

That is a fair statement about Google, and an incomplete one about the field. For other assistants, and even for Google’s own AI answers, ranking and citation have partly separated: depending on the study, between 17% and 38% of AI Overview citations also rank in the top ten organic results. The foundation is SEO. What sits on top of it — being mentioned on the pages engines retrieve, being measured on a fixed prompt set, being quotable — is the part the AEO and GEO labels are trying to name. See how AI engines choose their sources for the engine-by-engine detail.

The Australian acronym problem

Both acronyms are crowded in Australia, and it affects searching, hiring and even AI answers themselves.

AEO is the Australian Border Force’s term for an Authorised Economic Operator, the customs status behind its Australian Trusted Trader programme. It is also American Eagle Outfitters’ ticker on the New York Stock Exchange. In our own September 2026 measurement, an AI engine answering “AEO consultant Brisbane” cited a study-abroad agency that trades as AEO.

GEO already belongs to geography, geology and geospatial work, including the intergovernmental Group on Earth Observations, in which Geoscience Australia represents the country. The difference shows up in advertising prices: in Semrush’s Australian data the phrase “geo services” carried a cost per click of about $2.92, against roughly $13 to $18 for marketing phrases such as “aeo services” and “ai seo agency” — a strong hint that most people typing it are not looking for marketing.

The practical rule: spell it out. When you search for a provider, when you describe your own services, and when you name a page, put “answer engine optimisation” next to the acronym. Engines resolve ambiguous strings from context, and when the context is thin, they guess.

Which one are you buying?

• Your problem is that you do not rank for searches your buyers make: that is SEO, and it is still the foundation.
• Your problem is that AI assistants recommend competitors and not you: that is AEO, GEO or AI SEO, whichever the proposal calls it. Judge it on method — a prompt set, a citation map, a plan for third-party sources — not on the label. AI SEO agency, Australia lists the tests.
• You are deciding how to split money between the two: see AEO vs SEO, which is about budget rather than definitions.