SEO, AEO and GEO: what each means, and what to do
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Three terms get used for one job: being found when someone looks for what you sell. Here is what each means, what the search and AI companies actually say about them, what the research shows, and an order to do the work in.
The three terms
| Term | Stands for | In plain words |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Search engine optimization | Helping search engines find, understand and show your pages. |
| AEO | Answer engine optimization | Being part of the answer when an assistant answers a question directly. |
| GEO | Generative engine optimization | The same aim, named after the generated answers of AI search. |
AEO and GEO are newer labels for work that overlaps almost entirely with SEO. Google’s own guide says so directly: “optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO” (Google’s guide to generative AI search). They are not three separate checklists.
What the companies themselves say
- To be in Google’s AI answers, be in Google Search. A page “must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet”, and “there are no additional technical requirements” (AI features and your website).
- No special markup is needed. “Structured data isn’t required for generative AI search, and there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.”
- No special file is needed. Of llms.txt and similar files, Google says “Google Search itself doesn’t use them.”
- There is no right length. “There’s no ideal page length.” “There’s no requirement to break your content into tiny pieces for AI to better understand it.”
- Manufactured mentions don’t help. Google says that “seeking inauthentic ‘mentions’ across the web isn’t as helpful as it might seem.”
- ChatGPT search needs its crawler let in. Sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot “will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (OpenAI’s crawlers).
These quotes are Google’s and OpenAI’s about their own products. They don’t describe every assistant.
What the research shows, and how far to trust it
- Rewriting for AI: mixed. The paper that named GEO reported that its methods “can boost visibility by up to 40%” on its own benchmark (Aggarwal and others, KDD 2024). A larger benchmark a year later found that most such methods are “largely ineffective” and that traditional SEO works better (C-SEO Bench, NeurIPS 2025).
- Being mentioned elsewhere: the strongest pattern so far. Across 75,000 brands, mentions of a brand on other websites correlated with appearing in Google’s AI Overviews more than any other factor studied (0.664), well ahead of backlinks (0.218) (Ahrefs, May 2025). This is a correlation among established brands, not proof of cause.
- Adding schema: no measurable lift. Tracking 1,885 pages that added structured data, citations in ChatGPT changed by +2.2%, which could not be told apart from zero (Ahrefs, May 2026).
- Fresh pages: cited somewhat more. Pages cited by AI assistants were on average 25.7% newer than those in Google’s ordinary results (Ahrefs, July 2025). Changing a date without changing the page is not what this measured.
Each of these studied particular systems at a particular time. None is a rule an assistant has promised to follow.
An order to do the work in
- Make sure you can be read. Words in the HTML, crawlers allowed, real 404s. How to check.
- Make sure you are indexed. Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, with your sitemap submitted.
- Say plainly what you are. One sentence on the home page: what you sell and to whom. Use the same sentence on your profiles elsewhere. If other companies share your name, this matters more.
- Answer the questions buyers ask. On your existing pages first. Write a new page when a real question has no home.
- Earn mentions where buyers and assistants already read. Reviews, comparisons, communities. Real ones.
- Measure, change one thing, measure again. How to measure.
What to skip
- A file or a markup type sold as the switch that makes AI recommend you.
- Word counts, “chunk” sizes and keyword formulas presented as rules.
- A page for every wording of every question.
- Fake reviews, invented customers and manufactured forum threads.
- A single score out of 100 that claims to describe every assistant.
Words you will meet
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Crawling | A program requesting your pages. |
| Indexing | A search engine storing a page so it can be found. |
| Grounding | An assistant searching the web and answering from what it found, not from memory. |
| Citation | A source an answer names or links for what it says. |
| Canonical | The one address you want used when a page can be reached at several. |
| Structured data | Facts about a page written in a format machines read, such as JSON-LD. |
Wellread covers steps 1, 4, 5 and 6 of that order for you: it checks your site can be read, shows which buyer questions it answers, names the sites the assistants read, and measures what ChatGPT and Gemini say. What an audit is.