AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what each term means and which one you are buying

SEO aims to rank your pages in search results. AEO aims to make your content the direct answer to a question. GEO aims to get your content included in AI-written responses. In practice the work overlaps heavily, so the label on a proposal tells you little. What you are buying is the list of deliverables and how they are measured.

What does SEO mean today?

Search engine optimization is the work of getting pages crawled, indexed and ranked in search engines. Its outcome is a position on a results page, and its usual measures are impressions, clicks and rankings, most of which you can read in Google Search Console.

SEO has not been replaced. Google's own guidance on AI features says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, the same technical bar as ordinary Search. Google also says no new AI text files or special schema markup are needed for those features.

That does not mean ranking and being cited are the same thing. Ahrefs, which sells SEO software, reports that about 38% of URLs cited in AI Overviews also appeared in the top 10 for the same query, down from roughly 76% in its July 2025 study. The sample was 863K keyword results and 4M cited URLs. Google's guidance offers one possible reason: its AI features may use query fan-out, running related searches across subtopics, so supporting links can come from beyond a single results page.

What does AEO mean?

AEO usually stands for answer engine optimization. It means shaping content so a system can lift a clear answer to a specific question, whether that system is a search feature, a voice assistant or an AI chatbot. Typical work includes question-led headings, a direct answer near the top of a page, FAQ sections and clean page structure.

The term has no single owner or agreed definition. Some vendors use AEO to mean everything to do with AI search. Others keep it narrow and treat it as answer formatting. That is why you should ask any vendor using the term to define it in writing.

What does GEO mean?

GEO stands for generative engine optimization, and unlike AEO it has a clear academic source. A paper by researchers including Pranjal Aggarwal and Karthik Narasimhan, first submitted in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024, framed it as a way to help creators raise how visible their content is in generative engine responses. The abstract says GEO can boost visibility by up to 40%.

That number is often quoted without context. The full paper ran its main tests on the authors' own engine, built on gpt-3.5-turbo and top Google results, with a smaller real-world test on Perplexity. Adding quotations, statistics and cited sources helped, while keyword stuffing fell below baseline on the authors' engine. Those are useful directions from a controlled experiment. They are not a forecast for your website, and the test engines have changed since.

How do the three terms compare?

The table shows the cleanest version of the distinction. Real projects blur it. A technical fix that helps Google crawl a page also helps any search-based AI product that relies on Google's index. A page with a direct answer serves AEO and GEO equally.

Other labels add to the confusion: AI SEO, LLM SEO, AI visibility and AI search optimization. Treat them as marketing variations until a vendor shows you what changes on your site and elsewhere.

Which one are you actually buying?

Ignore the acronym and sort the proposal into four buckets:

• Measurement: which engines are tracked, how many questions, how often, and how many runs per question. AI answers vary between runs, so one check tells you little.
• On-site work: technical fixes, new pages and improved pages, with monthly quantities.
• Off-site work: third-party lists, reviews, press, links or outreach, and whether the vendor does that work or only drafts it.
• Reporting: what you see each week or month, and whether it separates AI visibility from Google traffic.

If a "GEO" proposal has tracking and nothing else, you are buying a dashboard. If an "AEO" proposal is a set of blog posts with FAQ blocks, you are buying content. If an "SEO" retainer includes weekly checks across AI engines, it covers more than its name suggests.

What should you ask before signing?

1. Please define the term you are selling in one sentence. What is excluded?
2. Which engines do you measure, and how do you handle variation between runs?
3. What ships in a normal month, and who writes it?
4. Who approves changes before they go live?
5. How would I know within 90 days whether this is working, and which results come from clients rather than your own site?

The last question matters most. Be careful with any vendor promising a guaranteed citation. Google itself says that meeting its requirements does not guarantee being crawled, indexed or served.

Which metrics belong to which term?

Reports get muddled when one number is used to prove everything. Keep these separate:

• Google clicks and impressions show SEO performance. They come from Search Console and do not tell you what an AI product said about you.
• Share of answers shows how often you appear across a fixed set of questions on a given engine. It is the closest thing to a GEO metric, and it only means something if the question set stays stable and each question is run more than once.
• Citations and mentions are different events. A citation links to a page, and a mention names your brand without necessarily linking to you. Ask which one a report is counting.
• AI assistant visits, visible in GA4, show people arriving from AI products. Expect them to be small relative to search traffic, and do not treat low numbers as proof that nothing is happening, since a buyer can read your name in an answer and never click.

A vendor should be able to tell you which of these it expects to move first and which depend on factors outside its control.

Do you need all three?

Most B2B companies need one joined-up program rather than three vendors. Start with the basics that every label depends on. Make sure your site can be crawled, including by the AI products you care about. OpenAI, for example, says a site must allow OAI-SearchBot to appear in ChatGPT search answers, and that this is separate from GPTBot, its training crawler. Blocking the wrong one is an easy mistake.

Then write down the questions your buyers actually ask, measure whether you are named in the answers, and fix the gaps. The free AI readability grader and AI visibility checker are one quick way to get a first reading of your position.

Where does Fame Search fit?

Fame publishes this article and sells Fame Search, so weigh this section accordingly. Fame Search costs $2,000 a month and combines the work above: weekly tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, one action on your site each day, Search Console and GA4 tracking, and outreach drafts for third-party lists. It does not include a link-building program. You approve every change.

We have pages explaining the service under each common label, including AEO agency, GEO agency, LLM SEO and B2B SEO agency. The service is the same one plan on all of them, which is rather the point of this article. Fame's published results so far are for its own site, fame.so, not for clients.