On this page
Two acronyms turn up in every conversation about getting found by AI: AEO and GEO. Both are sold as the new SEO, search engine optimization, the work of ranking on Google. 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 by Aggarwal and colleagues. A "generative engine" is any AI that looks up web pages and then writes an answer from them, like ChatGPT search or Perplexity. The paper tested whether rewriting a page changes how often the AI names it as a source. It found gains of up to 40% from changing the writing alone, depending on the topic.
AEO, answer engine optimization, is the older phrase. It was in use when the fight was over the answer boxes at the top of Google and the answers voice assistants read out. How it works has 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 an AI writes, rather than into a list of links.
- Both depend on the AI finding your store's pages first, and being able to quote them second.
- Both are measured by how often AI names or links to you, not by your spot in a list of results.
GEO papers tend to focus on how a page is written: whether it quotes sources, includes figures, and states things plainly enough to be quoted. AEO writing tends to focus on laying pages out as questions and answers. For a store, both come down to the same thing: does your product information answer the question, in words an AI can repeat?
What transfers from SEO, and what doesn't
Transfers:
- Letting search engines and AI visit and save your pages. If their programs can't visit a page, no AI can cite it.
- Structured data, the hidden code that labels facts like price and size. It's the clearest way to state a fact about a product to a search engine.
- Genuinely useful content, which was always the durable part.
Doesn't transfer as well:
- Repeating keywords and tweaking page titles. There's no ranked list to climb in an AI answer.
- Code added just to earn a search badge. Google cut back the FAQ boxes under search results in 2023 and has since removed them, so code added just to earn that box stopped paying off.
- Counting links to your site. Links still matter a little, through which websites an AI trusts, but they aren't the lever they were.
If you run a Shopify store, we sort each common SEO task into keep, change or new in AEO vs SEO for Shopify stores.
For a store, the work is the same either way
Whichever acronym is on the invoice, the job for an online store is:
- Make every listing say what the product is for, who it fits, and how it compares.
- Put those facts in structured data as well as in the written description, using the fields Google lists for merchant listings and OpenAI lists for product feeds.
- Keep price, stock, sizes and colors accurate everywhere they appear.
- 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 improving your product information, or just rewriting the short page summaries that show up in Google results.
