If you've searched for how to stay visible now that AI assistants answer questions directly, you'll have hit both acronyms: AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation). They're often used interchangeably, which is unhelpful, because the distinction actually matters when you're deciding what work to do.
What answer engine optimisation covers
AEO is the older idea. It grew out of featured snippets and voice search: structure your content so that an engine can lift a direct answer from it. Question-shaped headings, a concise answer in the first sentence or two, structured data where it applies. The engine still points back at your page, the goal is to be the page it lifts from.
What generative engine optimisation covers
GEO targets engines that generate the answer, assistants and AI search experiences that synthesise several sources into a few sentences and name only a handful of businesses or pages. The goal shifts from being the lifted snippet to being cited or recommended inside a generated answer. That depends on different things: whether the engine can parse and trust your page, whether your business is plainly named alongside what it does, and whether other credible sources corroborate you.
Where they overlap, and where SEO fits
In practice the three stack rather than compete. Classic SEO earns the authority that makes engines treat you as a source at all. AEO structure makes your pages liftable. GEO extends both to engines that compose answers rather than rank pages. A page built properly serves all three at once, which is why treating GEO as a separate project, or a separate vendor, usually produces duplicated work. What earns a mention inside those composed answers is its own skill — how to rank in ChatGPT and how to rank in Perplexity cover it for the two assistants your buyers are most likely to ask.
- ✓SEO: be indexed, be credible, rank for the searches your buyers make
- ✓AEO: structure pages so an engine can lift the answer directly
- ✓GEO: be named and cited inside generated answers, and measure how often that happens
What to do first
Start by finding out whether the engines mention you at all today. Ask the assistants your buyers use the questions your buyers ask, and note who gets named, it's usually a shorter, more surprising list than the classic search results for the same query. That gap between who ranks and who gets cited is where the opportunity sits, and right now competition for it is thin. Turning that one-off check into a number you watch monthly is what how to measure AI visibility is for.