By David Jenkins, Digital Director
In the early days of Google searches, business leaders and website owners quickly learned the value of having their sites appear near the top of the results. Prominent placement could drive traffic, leads, and ultimately revenue. That realization helped give birth to the SEO industry and, in many ways, changed how websites were built and marketed.
Fast forward to today, and website owners are asking a new question: how do I get my business to appear in AI search results?
Whether it’s Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI-powered search experience, the fundamental idea is the same. When your business appears for valuable search queries, opportunities and profits can follow.
But the rise of AI search has also brought with it a slew of new acronyms. AEO, GEO, and seemingly every other combination of letters ending in EO. While the terminology is still being debated, two terms have emerged as the most prominent: AEO and GEO.
At a high level, AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization, is about positioning your content to be used in direct answers to users’ questions. Think of an AI Overview answering a question and citing your website as a source.
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is broader. It focuses on increasing the likelihood that an AI-powered search engine will recognize, understand, and recommend your business, products, or content in its generated responses. Say someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend the best roofers in their area and your company appears in the list — that’s the kind of visibility businesses are increasingly pursuing through GEO.
The terminology may not be perfectly settled, and the lines between AEO and GEO can certainly blur. But understanding the distinction is important for anyone responsible for a website, a brand, or a digital marketing strategy.
AEO and GEO may seem somewhat similar because they’re different points of emphasis within the same underlying work. Consider the following:
| AEO | GEO | |
| Primary goal | Become the answer | Become part of the generated answer |
| Typical query | “What is X?” | “What are the best X?” |
| Output | Direct answer | Synthesized response or recommendation |
| Focus | Content | Content + authority + digital presence |
| Primary platforms | Google, Bing, voice | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot |
| Success | Answer visibility | Mentions, citations, recommendations |
That last letter, O, is doing the work. Optimization is the reason behind it all, but what are you optimizing for?
With AEO, you’re trying to win the answer. Take the query “What’s the capital of Georgia?” The goal is that your content is the exact thing Google, or another answer engine, selects.
With GEO, you’re trying to win consideration. Take the query “Who are the best architects in Cleveland?” The goal is that your company is one of the businesses the AI system weighs and ideally recommends.
That’s a genuinely different objective, not just a different acronym. AEO is a single-answer competition. GEO is a shortlist competition.
Don’t write for an algorithm. Write content that’s exceptionally easy to understand and extract. The days of keyword stuffing and writing sentences like, “we’re a good marketing company in Lancaster, that’s an experienced marketing company in Lancaster,” are long gone. To optimize for AEO:
GEO isn’t simply putting an FAQ on your website and adding schema. Your entire digital footprint matters: reviews, third-party mentions, consistency of information, and crawler access. To optimize for GEO:
That last one is easy to overlook, and it undercuts everything else on this list if it’s wrong. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended are blocked in your robots.txt, none of the rest of this matters, because the model never sees the site in the first place. It’s absolutely worth checking before investing in anything else here.
Successful AEO and GEO implementation is easy to recognize. For AEO, your business shows up when a prospective customer asks a question, they trust what they see, and they reach out. For GEO, when an AI platform is asked for a recommendation, your company is in the answer, and that turns into a call, a form fill, or a sale. That’s the whole loop.
Measuring that loop, though, is still fragmented. Google Search Console now reports on impressions and visibility within AI Overviews and AI Mode, but it doesn’t cover ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Gemini, and it can’t tell you about brand mentions or citations. Referral traffic in your analytics tools captures some non-Google visits, but plenty of people act on an AI recommendation without ever clicking through, so that’s a partial picture too.
That’s the gap “AI share of voice” is meant to fill: asking a consistent set of relevant questions across AI platforms and tracking how often your business comes up, how it’s described, and how often competitors show up instead. It’s manual and imperfect, and results might shift by platform, in phrasing, and in personalization, but it’s currently the most direct way to answer the question that actually matters: when someone asks AI about a product or service you offer, is yours the business they read about?
If you want to make your presence felt in the world of AI search results, Alpha Dog Advertising can help. Let our up-to-the-minute research and understanding of the ever-changing landscape of AI search guide your company. Whether B2B, B2C, or a blending of both, we have the knowledge and expertise needed to get you the placement you’re looking for. To learn more, contact us today to schedule a no-obligation consultation.
