A client rang me last spring, a bit rattled. His agency had just sent a proposal for “GEO”, listed as a brand new line on top of his usual retainer, and he wanted to know whether he was being taken for a ride.
Sort of, yes. But only sort of, which is why I didn’t tell him to bin it. There’s something real under those acronyms. It’s just smaller, and far less mysterious, than the pitch deck made it sound.
The alphabet soup, quickly
AEO is answer engine optimisation, and it’s the older of the two. It came out of featured snippets, and those “People also ask” boxes, back when the goal was to be the answer rather than one of ten links. Ever tidied up a paragraph so the definition sits right under the heading in about forty plain words? That’s AEO. You just called it SEO at the time.
GEO is generative engine optimisation. The target here is being a source that ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini leans on when it writes an answer from scratch. AEO gets you picked for a slot. GEO gets you quoted inside something new. Honestly, the two overlap so heavily that arguing about the border is mostly a hobby for conference speakers.
What matters is what you do on Monday morning.
Why bother
Because clicks are moving around. Pew Research followed real browsing across nearly 69,000 Google searches. When an AI summary showed up, people clicked a regular result about 8% of the time. When it didn’t, 15%. Ahrefs found the page sitting in first position lost around a third of its click-through rate under an AI Overview.
Ouch. But Semrush found that visitors from AI search convert at a rate that makes each one worth about 4.4 times a typical organic visitor. So fewer clicks, better ones.
And Google’s still here. BrightEdge has organic search at roughly 53% of trackable website traffic, so nobody’s picking between old and new. You just need to be findable in both places.
What the research says
In 2023, a team of academics built a benchmark called GEO-Bench and tried a bunch of tactics on AI-generated answers. Some lifted a source’s visibility by as much as 40%. The ones that helped most were adding quotations, statistics, and clear citations.
Which any decent editor would have told you thirty years ago, for free.
The bit people skip is that the results swung a lot between subjects. A tactic that worked well in one field did next to nothing in another. So I get twitchy whenever someone hands me a universal twelve-point GEO checklist. Try things in your own market and see.
How to actually win
None of this is glamorous, and that’s more or less the point.
Sort the basics first. If search engines can’t crawl your site, or it takes six seconds to load, or the structure’s a mess, no acronym will save you. AI tools mostly pull from pages that are already findable and trusted, so skip this step, and you’re building on sand.
Then put the answer first. AI tools grab small chunks of text and leave the rest. If your main answer is buried in paragraph nine, nobody’s quoting it. Open with the answer in a sentence or two, explain afterwards. Go and look at your top commercial pages and count how many do this. Usually it’s not many.
Back things up, too. Instead of “many customers save money”, write the actual figure and say where it came from. It helps a person believe you, and it gives a machine something solid to lift.
Each section should also make sense on its own. A chunk that gets pulled out has to survive without the paragraphs around it, so go easy on “as mentioned above”. Clever headlines that don’t say what the section covers cost you here as well.
Schema markup is worth doing, but don’t expect miracles. It won’t make a model cite you. It just clears up what your page is and who’s behind it. Housekeeping, really.
The last one is the thing I underestimated for ages: being mentioned somewhere that isn’t your own site. AI tools read Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, YouTube videos, reviews, and industry write-ups, and what’s said about you in those places feeds into what the tools say about you. Original data, a named expert willing to be quoted, an actual presence wherever your buyers talk to each other. Slow work. Probably the most valuable on the list.
Measuring it without going mad
Rank tracking won’t tell you much here, because AI answers aren’t a stable ordered list. Studies suggest 40 to 60% of the sources cited in AI responses change from one month to the next, so expect plenty of noise.
Track these instead: referral traffic from AI tools, split by source; how often you get named for a fixed list of twenty or thirty customer questions, checked monthly; and branded search volume, which tends to move first. Read the quarter, not the week.
And if you’ve never looked, do it this afternoon. Type your customers’ questions into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Mode and write down who gets named. About an hour. More revealing than most paid audits.
Back to my client
If you’re shopping for SEO services right now, the GEO pitch is a handy test. Ask whether it’s a separate service or part of what they already do. Ask how they report on citations. Ask what they’d change for your industry, given that the research says results vary.
A good provider will admit most of GEO is solid SEO with better measurement and a bit more attention to your reputation elsewhere. Somebody selling a mysterious new discipline, with a long list of deliverables and nothing to back it up? That’s your answer.
My client kept his agency, by the way. But he made them split the proposal into what was genuinely new and what had just been renamed. The new part turned out to be about a third of the original invoice.
So what’s the plan
Fix the fundamentals. Make your best pages answer things quickly and back it up. Get your name into places besides your own website. Count citations, not just rankings. Then give it six to twelve months, because anything built on reputation moves slowly, just as SEO always has.
Questions people ask me
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No, it’s more of an extension. The same technical health, content quality, and authority help you in both. What’s new is where the results show up and how you measure them.
Do I need a separate agency for AEO and GEO?
Probably not. If your current team already handles technical SEO, content, and off-site authority properly, they’re doing most of it. The real question is whether they’re measuring it.
Does schema markup still matter?
Yes, as housekeeping. It won’t get you cited, but it helps clear up what your page is about.
Should I block AI crawlers?
For most businesses, no. You’d be taking yourself out of the answers where buyers are forming opinions. A few publishers with licensing leverage have good reasons, but decide it on purpose rather than by accident.
How long before I show up in AI answers?
A strong new page can get picked up within weeks. Anything that depends on your wider reputation takes more like six to twelve months.
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