First there was SEO, then AEO, and now GEO. I went looking for what the three acronyms mean and how they differ, and Google’s guide to optimizing for generative AI search answers it under a heading that asks whether SEO is still relevant: optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, “and thus still SEO” (checked July 30, 2026; the page shows a last update of July 10, 2026).
So this is not a post about learning a new discipline. It separates what the three words mean, copies out the list of things Google says you do not need to do, and ends with the numbers I got when I counted my own 23 published posts against that list. More of them failed than passed.
What do SEO, AEO and GEO actually mean?
Spelled out, the target moves from a search engine to an answer to a generative engine.
| Acronym | Spelled out | What it aims at |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Search Engine Optimization | A place in the results list |
| AEO | Answer Engine Optimization | Being pulled into the answer itself |
| GEO | Generative Engine Optimization | Being cited inside a generated answer |
That much is consistent everywhere. The disagreement starts one line later, at the border between AEO and GEO.
On July 30, 2026 I opened the top eight results for the comparison. Some split them cleanly: AEO is about being extracted into snippets and AI Overviews, GEO is about how an AI describes your brand. Others treat the two as the same job with two names. One page’s title simply asks whether answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization are the same thing. None of the eight matched another’s definition.
A term with a standard definition does not scatter like that. I read it as a sign of what the words are: a service arrived first and the name was attached afterward. I use the same test I used when sorting out DX, AX and AI agent. Take the word out of the sentence. If the meaning survives intact, it was a slogan, not a concept.
What does Google say the difference is?
It says there isn’t one worth naming. The guide puts generative AI optimization and search optimization in the same box, which means no new discipline appeared. One more surface did.
The more useful part of the same page is the list of things it says you can skip. Most of what gets sold under the AEO and GEO labels is on it.
| Common advice | What the Google page says |
|---|---|
| Publish an llms.txt or similar AI file | No new machine readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown are needed |
| Add schema built for AI answers | Structured data isn’t required, and there’s no special schema to add |
| Chop paragraphs into small cards | No requirement to break content into tiny pieces for AI |
| Rewrite in an AI friendly voice | No need to write in a specific way just for generative AI search |
| Cover every long-tail variation | No need to worry about missing variations |
| Get your name mentioned across the web | Chasing inauthentic mentions is less helpful than it looks |
FAQ markup has already gone the same way. Google’s FAQPage documentation now carries a notice at the top saying the FAQ rich result is no longer shown in Google Search (checked July 30, 2026). The display stopped on May 7, 2026 by most accounts, though that date comes from trade coverage rather than a Google announcement, because Google added a line to the doc instead of publishing a post. Either way, “add an FAQ block and the AI will quote you” has run out.
So nothing changed at all?
Three things changed. None of them is a new technique, and all three sit on the writing side.
Block the crawler and citation becomes impossible. The Google page states that its generative AI models use publicly accessible, crawlable content. WordPress hides a single switch that turns this off: the checkbox under Settings then Reading that discourages search engines from indexing the site. People tick it while building and forget. That is why the checkbox gets its own line in my walkthrough of building a WordPress site from start to finish.
Second, a sentence has to stand on its own. Generated answers lift sentences, not paragraphs. “This one came out at 18MB” collapses the moment it leaves its paragraph. “A nine-second GIF from Tenor came out at 18MB” does not. This is not an argument for summary boxes. It applies to the sentences that carry a number, and nowhere else.
Third, link your sources. The KDD 2024 paper that coined GEO found that the edits which raised citation rates most were citations, direct quotations and statistics. The authors report visibility gains of up to 40 percent, and it is worth saying where that number comes from: their own benchmark, not any disclosure from Google about how citations get chosen. I treat it as a direction rather than a tactic. Content that shows its sources has been the safer bet for years.
I counted my own 23 posts
Two of those three were not happening here. On July 30, 2026 I reopened the 23 English posts already up on this blog and counted: three of them contain even one link to an outside page. The other 20 have none.
The Korean side came out at three as well. All three are posts written after July 26, 2026, the day I decided links were required. Anything older compares five tools and gives the reader no way to reach any of the five. That is a reader problem before it is a search problem. Someone who finishes a comparison wants to open the sites, and the door was missing.
Subheadings told a similar story. Of 162 English subheadings, 55 are phrased as a question a reader would actually type. The Korean posts have the same 162 subheadings and only 34 questions, because Korean tends to close a heading with a noun phrase. Counting question marks alone puts the Korean number at zero, since Korean questions do not need one.
One thing came out right by accident. Both sites still return 404 for llms.txt, checked on July 30, 2026. I never made the file because I never got around to it, and by Google’s own page it was never needed. The robots.txt blocks one admin folder and nothing else, so every AI crawler walks in. Luck, not planning.
The pattern is easy to summarize. Studying the acronyms produced nothing I could act on. Counting my own posts against rules I already knew produced a list of repairs.
Where do you check whether AI answers used your page?
Inside Google Search Console, as of June 2026. Google attached generative AI performance reports to Search Console, so impressions from features like AI Overviews and AI Mode now show up on their own.
It leans on impressions for now. Reporting suggests clicks and queries are not there yet, and I am relying on trade coverage for that detail because I could not read Google’s announcement body directly. The order of operations is clear enough anyway. Before paying for a tool that promises to track your AI visibility, open the free screen in Search Console. A slow page holding back indexing may be the more urgent problem, which is the sort of thing I found when I actually measured this site’s speed.
What about ChatGPT and the other engines?
The one published requirement is the same: let the crawler in. OpenAI’s crawler documentation separates the jobs, and the sentence that matters for visibility is blunt. OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and “sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers” (checked July 30, 2026). GPTBot is a different decision, about training rather than being cited.
What none of the engines I checked publishes is how it picks which of the crawlable pages to quote. That gap is where the acronyms live. Anyone selling certainty about the selection logic is guessing, and the guesses cost you an llms.txt file and an FAQ block that Google has already written off.
So the job this week is not memorizing three acronyms. Link the official page of every tool you name, rewrite the sentences that carry numbers so they stand alone, and confirm you are not blocking the crawlers. Go count. Mine came back 20 out of 23.