23 October 2026
In short
- AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): making sure your business is in the answer when someone asks.
- GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): making sure AI uses and cites your information when it writes an answer.
- In practice, agencies and tools use both names for the same work. You'll also hear “AI SEO” or LLMO (LLM Optimization).
Where AEO comes from
SEO people were using the term before ChatGPT. It came from Google's direct answers, the featured snippets at the top of the results and the “People also ask” box, and from voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa, which answer with a single sentence instead of a list of links.
The core idea is the question and the answer: someone asks and gets an answer, not ten results. With ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews, the same idea now applies to answers written by AI.
Where GEO comes from
The term comes from a 2023 research paper by researchers at Princeton University and other institutions, which studied how generative engines choose the sources they use in their answers. They tested changes to texts and found that adding sources, quotations and statistics made those texts more visible in AI answers.
The core idea is the content: what makes AI use a page, and cite it, when it writes the answer.
Side by side
- The question they ask. AEO: “when a customer asks, does the answer include my business?” GEO: “when AI writes, does it use my information?”
- Where they started. AEO: Google's direct answers and voice assistants. GEO: research on generative engines.
- What gets measured. AEO: how many answers you appear in, and in what position. GEO: how often your website is used or cited as a source.
- Who uses each term. AEO is more common among people coming from SEO. GEO caught on with newer tools and startups. Many use both.
For a local business, it's AEO
People looking for a dentist, a garage or a restaurant ask a question: “who's the best dentist in Leeds?”. AI answers with two or three names. What matters to the business is being one of those names, more than being cited as a source. That is AEO, almost word for word.
But the work to get there is the same work GEO describes:
- Services, prices, opening hours and address as text on the website, not only in images.
- Business markup (schema.org) and an llms.txt file.
- A complete Google Business Profile with recent reviews.
- Listings in the directories and websites AI consults for your type of business.
- The same details everywhere, so AI can trust them.
The guide What is GEO and how to do it explains each of these and the three steps to measure, fix and measure again.
How to find out where you stand
Call it AEO or GEO, the first step is to measure: ask AI the questions your customers ask and count how many answers you appear in. Chatlisted's AI visibility checker does this for free, on ChatGPT and Perplexity, and shows who AI recommends instead of you. The methodology explains how the score and the margin of error are worked out.