What AEO and GEO actually are, and why your vendor is lying to you about both.

Let's get the definitions out of the way so we can be precise about who is selling what.

AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is the practice of structuring content so that an answer engine like Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, or ChatGPT with browsing cites you when a user asks a question. It is mostly about being the source of a clean, parseable, defensible claim. Underneath the new acronym, it is the same thing technical SEO has always been: make your page easy to extract, and make the extraction worth citing.

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is, depending on who you ask, either a synonym for AEO or a slightly broader version that includes optimizing for non-search-driven generation (an LLM writing a comparison post, an agent producing a buyer's shortlist). The honest answer is that a few consultants coined the term in late 2023 because they needed a fresh acronym to put in a deck, since "SEO" had started to sound like something your dad does.

Here is what nobody selling either service will tell you: most of what works for AEO is just good writing.

• Make a claim.
• Defend the claim with a number, a date, or a name.
• Don't bury it on page 14 of a content hub.
• Don't write the same paragraph six times with the keywords slightly shuffled.
• Update the page when the claim stops being true.

That is the whole methodology. Anyone selling you a $40,000 GEO audit is selling you a checklist that fits on an index card, padded out with screenshots of dashboards that mean nothing.

The real shift, the one worth caring about, is not technical. It is positional. When the answer engine cites three sources, only one company is the one a buyer remembers. Being one of the three only gets you in the door. Being the one is a brand problem, not an optimization problem. You don't solve brand problems with structured data. You solve them by having an opinion.

This is the part the GEO industry can't do for you, and it is the part that actually decides whether the citation turns into a deal. The model picked you. Now what?

Our take: spend less time worrying about the citation and more time worrying about what happens after the click. The page the answer engine sends them to had better not look like the page the answer engine sent them to last time, from your competitor, written by the same model, optimized by the same vendor, with the same five bullet points in the same order.

It will. Right now, almost all of them do. That's the actual opportunity.