The Delulu Blog

SEO vs. AEO vs. GEO: What Actually Changes—and What Doesn't

By Eric Barker · August 2026 SEO & Search

Somewhere in the last two years, three acronyms started showing up in the same sentence as your marketing budget. SEO you already know. AEO and GEO showed up more recently, usually in a pitch that implies your existing SEO work is now obsolete — that there's a new discipline you need, with a new agency to sell it to you. There isn't. There's one discipline reaching more surfaces, and a couple of genuinely new mechanics worth understanding underneath the new vocabulary.

Here's the straight version: what each term actually means, where they overlap completely, what's genuinely different about how visibility works now, and what hasn't changed at all.

What each term actually means

SEO — search engine optimization. The established discipline. Decades old, well understood, built around getting a page found, ranked, and clicked in a search engine's organic index — Google, overwhelmingly, for most businesses. Crawlability, technical health, keyword-relevant content, backlinks, structured data, and reputation all feed into it. Nothing about SEO's actual mechanics changed when AI entered search results; what changed is where the results of that work now show up.

AEO — answer engine optimization. A newer label for optimizing toward surfaces that answer a question directly instead of listing links to click through — Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and voice assistants. AEO isn't tied to a single coiner or a founding paper; it emerged as an industry label across 2024 and 2025, tracking the same period ChatGPT went mainstream, Perplexity grew fast, and Google's AI Overviews launched broadly in May 2024. It describes a real shift in where answers appear — it's not a separate technical discipline from SEO underneath.

GEO — generative engine optimization. This one has an actual, checkable origin, and it's worth naming honestly: the term comes from a 2023 academic paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization," written by researchers at Princeton and Georgia Tech (Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan, and Deshpande), first posted to arXiv in November 2023 and presented at the ACM SIGKDD conference in 2024. The paper proposed GEO as a formal framework for testing which content changes actually move visibility inside LLM-generated answers — and built a benchmark, GEO-bench, to test it across roughly 10,000 queries. Most of the content using "GEO" today has nothing to do with that paper. That's worth knowing before anyone sells you a "GEO strategy."

Where SEO, AEO, and GEO overlap completely

Here's the part most pitches skip: Google's own documentation is explicit that none of this requires a new toolkit. Its "AI Features and Your Website" guidance states plainly that "there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary," and adds — directly addressing the most common myth — "there's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add." Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, has put it even more bluntly: getting cited in AI search results isn't "structured data and you win AI." Structured data helps a system parse and potentially cite your content — it just isn't decisive on its own.

What actually earns visibility across all three surfaces is the same short list:

• A page that can be crawled and indexed in the first place
• Clear, consistent information about who you are and what you do
• Structured data that accurately describes real content — not markup wrapped around thin content
• Genuinely useful, original writing that answers a real question
• External reputation — links, mentions, and references from real sources

None of that is new. It's the same list good SEO has rewarded for years, now read by more systems.

What has genuinely changed

Three things are real and worth understanding — not hype, just different mechanics than a ranked list of ten blue links.

Query fan-out. Google's own documentation describes AI Overviews and AI Mode using a technique it calls "query fan-out" — a single query gets expanded into multiple related searches across subtopics before a response is generated. That means your visibility for a given AI answer doesn't map one-to-one to your rank for the exact phrase someone typed; you're being evaluated against a wider, related set of searches happening behind the scenes.

Citation replaces (some) ranking. In classic search, visibility means a position — #1, #4, #9. In an AI-generated answer, visibility means being one of the sources cited or synthesized into the response, which is a different kind of selection, made independently of rank. A page can rank well and never get cited; a page further down the list sometimes does get cited, if the system judges its content the clearest source for a specific sub-claim.

Specific content choices measurably move the needle — in a generative engine, not a search results page. The GEO paper's own experiments found that certain content interventions moved a measured visibility score inside generative-engine responses: adding direct quotations from credible sources improved visibility by up to roughly 40%; adding statistics moved it by around 24%; citing sources by around 22%; improving basic fluency by around 22%. Classic keyword stuffing — the oldest SEO trick in the book — showed a negligible-to-negative effect. The authors are explicit that these effects vary by domain and aren't a universal formula. But the direction is clear: what wins here looks like better writing, not more keywords.

What hasn't changed at all

Google states it directly, and it's worth taking at face value: a page still has to be crawlable, indexed, and eligible to be shown with a snippet before any of this applies. AI visibility isn't a side door around basic technical SEO — it's downstream of it. And "just because a page meets all requirements, best practices, and complies with the policies," Google's own documentation adds, "doesn't mean that Google will crawl, index, or serve its content." Nothing here is guaranteed, in organic rank or in an AI answer.

The other constant is E-E-A-T — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, the framework Google's quality raters and, by its own description, its automated systems evaluate content against, with trust named as the most important of the four. That framework predates AI Overviews by years. It isn't being replaced by a new AI-specific scoring system; it's the same bar, applied to more surfaces.

Why strong SEO foundations still matter for AEO and GEO

This is the part the data backs up cleanly. Ahrefs analyzed 1.9 million citations across 1 million AI Overviews and found that 76.1% of cited pages already rank in the organic top 10, and 86% rank somewhere in the top 100. The median rank of the first-listed citation in an AI Overview is position 2. Ranking #1 organically does make a page more likely to get cited than a lower-ranked page — but the correlation is described in that same research as moderate at best, closer to a coin flip even at the top spot.

Read together, that's the honest picture: AI-search visibility rides on organic-search success far more than it operates as a separate track. A page with no organic footing has little shot at AI citation either. Build the SEO foundation, and you're already doing most of what AEO and GEO require.

What businesses should actually do

What claims and shortcuts to distrust

If a pitch promises guaranteed citations in ChatGPT or guaranteed inclusion in AI Overviews, that promise is false on its face — no vendor, including Design Delulu, controls what an AI system chooses to cite. If a pitch centers on a "secret GEO schema" or an "AI-optimized markup," it's selling something Google's own documentation says doesn't exist. And if a pitch quotes a citation-rate statistic with no named source or date behind it, treat it the way you'd treat any other unsourced marketing number — skeptically, until you can check it yourself.