SEO, GEO and AEO are not three separate trades. SEO makes a site show up in search engine results. GEO aims to get a brand used and cited in answers written by AI. AEO prepares pages to answer a specific question directly. The foundations are the same: pages crawlers can read, clear writing and consistent information. What mostly changes is where you look for the result.
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) makes a site easy for search engines to crawl, index and understand, and useful to the people searching. Google asks for content written first of all for people, and it weighs experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, with a recognizable author. It explains this in its Search Central guide to helpful content.
What is GEO?
GEO (generative engine optimization) concerns generative engines: systems that search the web and write an answer with sources. The term comes from the research paper “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, presented at KDD 2024.
The authors report visibility gains of up to 40% in generated answers. That is a laboratory result, measured on a set of test queries, and it varies by domain. It is not a promise for any single website.
What is AEO?
AEO (answer engine optimization) is an industry term, as in this definition, for making content suitable to be extracted and cited as an answer. We found no official search engine rules dedicated to AEO. In practice it means question-style headings, a short answer up front and the details right after. GEO and AEO overlap heavily, and where one ends and the other begins depends on who you ask.
How do they differ at a glance?
| SEO | GEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where you look | Search engine results | Generated answers that cite sources | Direct answers to a question |
| Goal | Appear and earn clicks | Be used as a source | Be the answer |
| What you work on | Technical setup, content, links | Verifiable content, consistent company data, outside sources | Page format, questions and answers |
Does Google’s AI search need special optimization?
No. Google’s documentation on AI features says there are no additional requirements and no special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet. You don’t need AI-specific files, dedicated markup or any particular schema.org data.
Google also notes that these features may use “query fan-out,” meaning several related searches across the subtopics of a question. Their traffic is included in the Search Console Performance report, under the “Web” search type. For Google, then, GEO and AEO are mostly good SEO.
What do OpenAI, Perplexity and Bing say about their crawlers?
- OpenAI. According to its crawler documentation, OAI-SearchBot surfaces sites in ChatGPT search: a site that opts out won’t appear in answers, though it can still show up as a navigational link. GPTBot relates to model training and is managed separately. ChatGPT-User acts on a person’s request, so robots.txt rules may not apply. A robots.txt change can take about 24 hours to take effect. How ChatGPT finds sources is explained in the ChatGPT search guide.
- Perplexity. In its bot documentation, PerplexityBot is for surfacing and linking sites in results, respects robots.txt and is not used to train foundation models. Perplexity-User fetches a page at the user’s request and generally ignores robots.txt.
- Bing and Copilot. Bingbot is Bing’s crawler and follows robots.txt directives, as a Bing blog post explains. The AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, in preview since February 2026, shows citations, cited pages and the queries used by Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries.
Is robots.txt enough to control where you appear?
Not always. Google explains in its robots.txt guide that the file tells crawlers which URLs they may visit and is not a way to keep a page out of Google. For that you use noindex. Blocking a search crawler such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, on the other hand, means giving up being shown in that service. It’s worth deciding bot by bot, and checking your CDN and firewall too.
Where should you start?
- Indexable pages, with the important content written as text.
- A clear answer up front for every real question your audience asks.
- Company details that match across your site, listings and profiles.
- Search crawlers not blocked by mistake.
- Regular checks with Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and the same questions asked several times to assistants. No citation can be guaranteed.
If you want to see how your site reads to Google and to AI assistants, even if someone else built it, our approach is described in the SEO, GEO and AEO service.