Concepts
Generative engine optimisationGEO
Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making a brand easier for AI assistants to find, trust and name in their answers. It covers the content on your own site, the structured data describing you, and the third-party sources engines lean on. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues.
GEO or AEO
Answer engine optimisation is the same practice under a different name, and the industry uses both interchangeably. We write GEO because it is the term with a paper behind it, and treat AEO as a synonym rather than a separate discipline. Anyone selling you a difference between the two is selling you a difference.
What it is not
GEO is not SEO renamed, although it inherits a great deal from it. The ranked list is gone, so the goal shifts from occupying a position to being one of the sources an answer gets built from — and from a single measurable rank to a distribution of answers that varies from run to run.
Related terms
- Answer engine optimisation — The same practice under a different name.
- AI visibility — What the practice is trying to move.
- Query fan-out — Why content that answers one narrow question cleanly tends to win.
- Entity — The part of the work that is not about content at all.
Last reviewed . Definitions are reviewed quarterly, and whenever the underlying measurement changes.
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