Why three names exist for one shift
For two decades, being found online meant appearing in a list of links. Many questions now get a written answer instead: a paragraph at the head of a results page, or a reply from an AI assistant that names a few companies and explains why. The buyer may never look at a list at all.
The marketing industry responded with labels faster than with agreed definitions. Answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation and AI SEO are all in use, often by different agencies for the same work, and sometimes by one agency for different work. No standards body owns these terms. The definitions below are the working ones we use, chosen because they separate tasks that need different skills.
The labels matter less than the tasks. Still, a buyer who can tell the three apart can read a proposal, see what is missing and ask sharper questions.
What answer engine optimisation (AEO) means
AEO is the work of making your own pages the source of a direct answer. The target is any place where a question is answered on the spot: the featured answer above the links, the expandable related questions, a voice reply, and the AI answers in search results that summarise several pages and cite them.
The unit of work is the question. An AEO project starts by collecting the questions buyers ask at each stage. It then makes sure one page on your site answers each of them plainly, early and in a form that can be lifted out without losing its meaning. Our guide to writing a page an AI answer can quote covers the craft in detail.
AEO is mostly an on-site discipline. It involves content structure, clear definitions, question headings and structured data that labels what a page contains. It is the closest of the three to classic search work, and an AEO services engagement usually sits beside an existing content programme and sharpens it.
What generative engine optimisation (GEO) means
GEO is the work of being named and recommended when an AI assistant composes an answer about your category. The buyer asks which accounting firms suit a small exporter, or which software handles a particular problem, and the assistant writes a short list with reasons. GEO asks whether you are on that list and whether the description of you is accurate.
The unit of work is the entity: your company as it is understood across the whole web, well beyond your own site. Assistants draw on what many sources say. GEO therefore spends much of its effort away from your site, on third-party articles, comparison pieces, review platforms, directories, industry communities and the consistency of basic facts between them.
This makes GEO closer to public relations and reputation work than to page editing. It moves more slowly than AEO, it depends on other people choosing to write about you, and nobody can promise its results.
What AI SEO means
AI SEO is the loosest of the three terms, and it is used in two senses. In the first, it is an umbrella: search optimisation for a period in which classic results and AI answers both matter. It covers AEO and GEO along with the technical and content foundations they rest on.
In the second sense, it means using AI tools to do search work: research, drafting, clustering and analysis. That is a statement about method, and it says nothing about where you will appear. A proposal can use AI heavily and still aim only at the ten links.
When we use the term for our own AI SEO work, we mean the first sense: one programme that treats classic rankings, quoted answers and assistant recommendations as connected outcomes. When you meet the term elsewhere, ask which sense is intended before comparing prices.
Where the three overlap
The overlap is large, and it is the reason the terms get blurred. All three depend on the same raw material: pages that can be crawled, facts that are stated clearly, and a business that is described the same way wherever it appears.
The differences are of emphasis. AEO concentrates on your pages and on questions with a factual answer. GEO concentrates on your reputation and on questions that ask for a recommendation. AI SEO, in its umbrella sense, is the plan that holds both together with the classic work underneath.
A useful way to remember it: AEO is about being quoted, GEO is about being named, and the foundations of search make either possible. The mechanisms behind naming are covered in how AI assistants decide which businesses to name.
- Plain statements of who you serve and what you do.
- Pages that answer one question well and can be read by a machine.
- Consistent names, services and locations across every profile.
- Evidence from third parties that supports your own claims.
How to read a proposal that uses these terms
Because the labels are unregulated, read past them to the deliverables. A sound proposal says which questions or prompts it is targeting, what will change on your site, what will be pursued away from your site, and how progress will be measured when answers vary from one run to the next.
Be wary of two things. The first is a guarantee of placement in AI answers, which no outside party can deliver. The second is a proposal that renames ordinary content production as AEO or GEO with no change in what is produced or how it is assessed.
- Which buyer questions and prompts are in scope?
- What is on-site work and what is off-site work?
- How is visibility measured, and how often?
- What is explicitly promised, and what is not?
Which one do you need first?
It depends on what buyers ask and where the gaps are. A business whose customers ask many factual questions (how something works, what it costs, what the steps are) usually gains most from AEO first, because the fix is within its own control.
A business in a category where buyers ask for recommendations, and where competitors are named and it is not, has a GEO problem that page editing alone will not solve. A business whose site is slow, thin or hard to crawl should fix that before either.
The practical way to find out is to test. An AI search audit you can run in an afternoon shows which kind of gap you have, and that should decide the order of work.
