SEO is the work of ranking in a list. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the work of being named inside the answer an AI writes. They draw on the same pages and differ in who decides: a ranking algorithm sorts, a language model composes. How far they overlap depends on the engine, and it is less than the vendors selling them separately would like.
Three terms, three surfaces, one body of work with a layer on top.
SEO is the work of ranking in a list of search results. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the work of being named and cited inside the generated answers of ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. AEO, answer engine optimization, is the older term for winning the single answer box. All three draw on the same pages. They differ in who decides and what success looks like.
The vocabulary arrived faster than the practice. In 2024 the industry started selling GEO as though it were a new discipline, and in some respects it is. But the raw material is the same: pages that exist, say something specific, and can be read by a machine. What changes is the judge. A ranking algorithm sorts pages by a hundred weighted signals. A language model composes an answer from whatever it retrieved, and it retrieves from directories, review profiles and roundups as readily as from your website.
That last point is the practical difference, and the AI visibility page shows how it is measured. A company can rank sixth for its category in ordinary search and never be named in an AI answer, because the AI built its answer from three directory listings that did not include it. The fix is partly the same work as SEO and partly different work: entity resolution, third-party presence, and citable specifics.
SEO and GEO overlap heavily and unevenly by engine. Published measurements through 2025 and 2026 put the share of Google AI Overview citations that also rank in the top ten organic results at roughly three quarters. For ChatGPT the figure is well under half. So for Google's AI surfaces, SEO is most of GEO. For ChatGPT it is less than half of it.
The practical reading is that SEO is the foundation and GEO, described in full on the GEO services page, is a layer on top whose thickness depends on the engine. If your buyers use Google, which most B2B buyers still do, then ranking well is most of the battle and the GEO-specific work is modest: structured data, unambiguous entity signals, a passage that answers the question directly. If your buyers are asking ChatGPT, then a larger share of what gets cited comes from sources you do not control, and the work shifts toward earning presence in those sources.
The percentages above are ranges from published studies and they move quarter to quarter. The pattern does not: Google's engines sit closest to ordinary search, ChatGPT sits furthest from it, and Gemini and AI Mode sit between.
GEO is measured separately from SEO because the AI engines disagree with each other, and a single blended score hides the disagreement. The same company we measured in August 2026 had 44 mentions in ChatGPT and 2 in Google AI Overview in the same week. Averaged, that is a healthy number. Separated, it is a specific fault in the engine most of its buyers use.
The two in that example, detailed on the AI Mode page, turned out to be a server returning an error code to Google's crawlers. ChatGPT, drawing on cached and third-party sources, was unaffected. AI Overview, reading the live site, could not retrieve it. One line in a server configuration was the difference between being named and not. A blended visibility score, the kind most tools sell, would never have surfaced it.
This is the argument for measuring the four engines as four measurements. They read different things, they weight different signals, and the fault that silences one frequently leaves another untouched.
A B2B company should invest in SEO first and GEO on top of it, and most of it is the same work. Build the pages that rank, because they are the raw material for every engine. Then do the GEO-specific work: resolve the company to one entity in one place, state certifications and facts in citable text, and earn presence in the directories and roundups AI systems draw on. Measure all four engines separately throughout.
The vendors selling GEO as a separate monthly service are not wrong that it is work. They are wrong that it is separate. Most of it is SEO done properly, with a layer of entity and citation work on top that does not need to recur monthly once it is done.
AEO, LLMO, LLM SEO and AI SEO are mostly the same thing as GEO with different letters. AEO, answer engine optimization, predates GEO and targeted featured snippets. LLMO and LLM SEO are synonyms for GEO. AI SEO is the umbrella. The practice underneath them has not fragmented the way the vocabulary has.
| Term | Stands for | Targets | In practice |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEO | Search engine optimization | Ranked results | The foundation for everything below |
| AEO | Answer engine optimization | Featured snippets, voice answers | Older term, largely absorbed into GEO |
| GEO | Generative engine optimization | AI-generated answers | Entity, citation and presence work on top of SEO |
| LLMO / LLM SEO | Large language model optimization | Same as GEO | A synonym |
| AI SEO | Umbrella | All of the above | What agencies put on the invoice |
A buyer trying to choose between vendors selling these as separate services is being asked to pay several times for one piece of work. The question to ask any of them is how they measure the four engines, and whether they measure them separately.
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