Three acronyms, one question: when someone looks for what you offer, do they find you?
- SEO (search engine optimization) is getting your pages to rank in Google and Bing, so people click through to your site.
- AEO (answer engine optimization) is getting named in the answer when someone asks an AI assistant: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, or Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode.
- GEO (generative engine optimization) is the same idea as AEO under a different name. Some people use it for chat assistants and AEO for featured snippets and voice answers, but in practice the two are used interchangeably, and they need the same work.
Our view: AEO and GEO are one thing. Don't buy two tools or split a budget over the name. The real line is between ranking in a list of links and being named in an answer.
What actually changed
Google shows ten links and lets the searcher choose. An AI assistant reads pages for the searcher and writes one answer, usually naming three to six brands. That changes four things:
| SEO | AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| What you win | A position in a list | A mention in an answer |
| How you measure it | Rankings, clicks, impressions | How often you're named, and next to whom |
| Who you compete with | The ten results on page one | Every brand the answer could name |
| Where it comes from | Your own page | Your page, and every page the engine read about you |
The last row is the biggest change. In SEO, your page has to be good. In AEO, what other sites say about you matters as much, because the engine builds its answer from several pages at once. A list article that names you can get you into an answer your own site never would.
The same site, two very different results
Here's ieltsbandlift.com, the site this course works on, measured both ways on the same day:
- Google: the homepage averages position 7.4 for the searches it shows up in. That's page one.
- AI answers: we asked 7 AI engines 5 questions our customers ask. 0 of 34 answers named it.
Page one on Google, invisible in AI answers. That's common, and it's why you have to measure both. One doesn't tell you the other.
The reason is the last row of the table. Google ranked our own page. The AI engines answered from other people's pages (the British Council, IDP, list articles, Quora threads), and we aren't on any of them yet. Lesson 7.2 shows the full list.
Why it's still one job
Most of the work is the same for both, which is why we don't think of them as separate strategies:
- Pages that answer the question well rank on Google and get read by AI engines that search the web.
- Being linked to and written about builds Google's trust and puts you on the pages AI engines cite.
- A site crawlers can read (lesson 5.3) matters to Googlebot and to GPTBot alike.
What AEO adds is a few habits on top: tracking questions instead of keywords, watching which pages AI cites, getting onto those pages, and checking that what the engines say about you is correct. That's Module 7.
Tip: If you only have time for one thing this month, write the page that answers your customers' most common question better than anything else out there. It helps both, every time.
Done when
- You can explain SEO and AEO to someone in one sentence each
- You know your own "two results": roughly where you rank on Google, and whether AI names you (lesson 7.1 sets that up)
- You know which pages that aren't yours might be speaking for you in AI answers