What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
Last updated: 9/3/2025
If you are active in the digital marketing world, you have likely heard two new terms floating around: “Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)” and "Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)”.
Don’t feel bad if these new terms have left you with a few questions. Digital marketing is already confusing enough; having to learn two new acronyms doesn’t make things any easier.
To clear up the confusion, let’s answer:
- What do they mean?
- Are they different?
- How can they help your business?
What is Answer Engine Optimization?
Answer engine optimization can essentially be viewed as the practice of creating and structuring content to better answer questions.
Most brands lack enough online content to address their target audience’s biggest questions. This means that when people turn to AI answer engines (like ChatGPT or Perplexity) with these questions, there is no way for the AEs to associate their questions with the brands that provide the solution.
AEO is the strategy of creating the right content to feed to the answer engines at that crucial moment when a prospective buyer asks the right question. For more information on AEO, check out this full article on the topic.
What is Generative Engine Optimization?
Even when the right content exists to answer a user's query, the answer engine might not always be able to find it.
Generative engine optimization is the effort to get that content found by AI. The goal of GEO is to optimize a website for AI discoverability, particularly the ability to be cited as a source in AI results. GEO has its own set of best practices for optimizing both content and technical specifications for answer engines. For more information on GEO, check out our overview here.
What is the difference?
AEO and GEO are highly related, but they are technically different, though you might sometimes hear the terms used interchangeably. So what is the core difference between the two?
- AEO enhances AI visibility by creating relevant, citable content
- GEO enhances AI visibility by applying the correct structure to existing content
While it’s not the best analogy, the difference between AEO and GEO can be likened to the difference between technical and on-page SEO. Both are essential parts of the same initiative, but the approach to each is unique.
How can AEO and GEO help your business?
When performed in unison, AEO and GEO can bring a number of benefits to your business.
Increased AI visibility
The most obvious benefit of a well-executed AEO/GEO approach is more visibility in answer engine results. Depending on your industry, answer engine visibility might cause a direct increase in inbound leads; however, not all industries have seen the same impact from AI search at this point. Regardless, with more and more search engines incorporating features like “AI summaries” into their search results, answer engine visibility will likely soon become a standard goal for marketing departments.
Improved sales methodology
One of the hidden benefits to diligently pursuing AEO/GEO is an improvement to your sales methodology. Many companies struggle to effectively communicate the value of their products or services during the sales process, focusing instead on mentioning key sales and marketing talking points that aren’t actually relevant to the customer’s problem. Taking the time to document answers to your customers’ biggest questions in a way that makes sense will help your sales team to empathize more with buyers during sales interactions.
SEO Benefit
Aside from AI visibility, because one of the core elements of an AEO/GEO strategy is adhering to best practices, investing in an AI optimization strategy should also improve your ranking in conventional search results.
If you are still looking for more information about AI for marketing, check out the AI section of our FAQ page.