AEO vs GEO: two names for the same job

Two acronyms turn up in every conversation about this: AEO and GEO. Both are sold as the new SEO. It's worth knowing which is which, mostly so you can stop worrying about it.

Where the words come from

GEO, generative engine optimization, comes from a 2024 research paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD '24). It defines a generative engine as a system that retrieves documents and has a language model write an answer from them, and tests whether changing a page changes how often it gets cited. The paper reports visibility gains of up to 40% from content changes alone, varying by domain.

AEO, answer engine optimization, is the older phrase. It was in use when the fight was over featured snippets, voice answers, and the boxes that answered a question without a click. The mechanics have changed since; the goal, being the answer rather than a link, hasn't.

What actually differs

In practice, very little.

• Both describe getting your content into an answer that a machine composes, rather than into a list of links.
• Both depend on being retrievable first and quotable second.
• Both are measured by citations and mentions, not by rank.

GEO papers tend to focus on how a page is written: whether it quotes sources, includes figures, and states things plainly enough to be lifted. AEO writing tends to focus on question-and-answer structure. For a store, both come down to the same thing: does your product data answer the question, in words a model can reuse?

What transfers from SEO, and what doesn't

Transfers:

• Crawlability and indexing. If a crawler can't fetch it, no engine can cite it.
• Structured data. It's the least ambiguous way to state a fact about a product.
• Genuinely useful content, which was always the durable part.

Doesn't transfer as well:

• Keyword density and title tweaking. There's no ranked list to climb in an answer.
• Markup for its own sake. Google restricted FAQ rich results in 2023 and has since retired them, so schema chosen for the badge rather than the meaning had a short life.
• Link volume as a proxy for authority. It still matters indirectly, through which sources an engine trusts, but it isn't the lever it was.

For a store, the work is the same either way

Whichever acronym is on the invoice, the job for an ecommerce catalog is:

1. Make every listing say what the product is for, who it fits, and how it compares.
2. Put those facts in structured data as well as prose, using the fields Google and OpenAI document (merchant listings, product feeds).
3. Keep price, stock, and variants accurate everywhere the data appears.
4. Measure by asking the assistants the questions your customers ask, and noting who gets named.

So which one should you ask for?

Ask for whichever word your team already uses. We say AEO because for a store the goal is concrete: when a shopper asks what to buy, be in the answer. If your agency says GEO and describes the same work, they're describing the same work.

The difference that matters isn't the acronym. It's whether the person you hire is rewriting your product data, or rewriting your meta descriptions.