Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) tunes a page to be pulled out as the single best answer — the featured snippet, the voice reply, the box that sits above Google's blue links. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) tunes your whole footprint to be cited and recommended when an AI engine writes an answer from many sources at once. AEO competes for one slot on one engine; GEO competes for a place inside a synthesized response spread across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, Grok and Google's AI Overviews. The content discipline underneath is similar. What counts as winning is not.
Think of them as cousins, not twins. AEO is mostly about formatting a clean, extractable answer. GEO is mostly about earning the authority and consensus that make an AI name you unprompted.
Key takeaways
- AEO gets your page extracted verbatim as the answer; GEO gets your brand synthesized, cited and recommended inside an AI-written response.
- AEO's unit of victory is a slot (Position Zero, a voice answer) on a single engine; GEO's is inclusion in an answer stitched together from many sources across many engines.
- Formatting alone can win a snippet. Winning generative citations takes consensus across trusted sites, entity authority, and genuine information gain.
- You rarely have to choose: one page can carry a tight AEO answer up top and GEO-grade depth below it.
- Google's own 2026 guidance frames AEO and GEO as "still SEO," so an indexable, snippet-eligible, well-structured page feeds both at once.
What AEO optimizes for
AEO grew out of the 2016–2022 voice-search and featured-snippet era, when the prize was Google's "Position Zero" and clean answers for Siri and Alexa. The engine behind it is classic information retrieval: match the query, then lift a passage from one page and present it as the answer.
The tactics that win here are narrow and well understood. Pose the exact question as a heading, answer it in a self-contained 40–60 words, and mark it up with FAQPage or how-to schema so the crawler can find the answer cleanly. Google's own featured-snippet documentation still describes this extraction behaviour, and featured snippets remain a strong leading indicator — pages that held a snippet are disproportionately the ones cited later in AI Overviews. For the deeper version, our What is AEO explainer walks through the schema and formatting patterns.
What GEO optimizes for
GEO belongs to the generative era that opened in late 2023. The term was formalized in the KDD 2024 paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", which studied how to increase a source's visibility inside answers an LLM composes by reading and summarizing many documents at once. The engine is not retrieval-and-quote; it is read-many-then-write.
