Three acronyms. One underlying job: be the source that answers the question.
The difference is who’s asking and what happens next. In SEO you want the click. In AEO you often don’t get one — and being the source that gets quoted is the win.
That distinction sounds academic until you look at your own analytics and notice informational impressions falling while conversions hold steady. That’s answer engines eating the top of your funnel. It’s not necessarily bad. It is definitely different.
What each one actually means
SEO — optimising to rank in a list of results. Crawlability, page speed, internal linking, backlinks, content that matches search intent. This is the foundation and it hasn’t gone anywhere.
AEO — answer engine optimisation. Being the source an assistant reaches for when someone asks a question directly. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google’s AI summaries. The user may never visit your site, but your name appears in the answer.
GEO — generative engine optimisation. The same idea, framed around generative search experiences specifically. In practice most of the work is identical to AEO, and the acronym proliferation is more marketing than method.
The techniques overlap heavily. What changes is what you consider a win.
Which one you need
If your buyers ask an assistant before they buy, prioritise AEO. B2B software, financial services, infrastructure, agencies, anything with a considered purchase and a research phase. When a founder asks an AI which firms handle crypto exchange development, being named in that answer is worth more than ranking fourth on a page nobody scrolls.
If your traffic is transactional, SEO still carries most of the weight. People searching to buy a specific thing still click, still compare, still convert on a page.
Most businesses need both, weighted differently. And the good news is that the work is largely shared — the pages that get cited by models are overwhelmingly the pages that already rank well.
What actually gets you cited
We’ve spent a lot of time testing this, and the pattern is consistent.
Answer first, context after. Every section should open with a complete sentence that answers the heading. Not a wind-up. If the model has to read four paragraphs to extract your point, it’ll extract someone else’s instead.
Specific facts beat adjectives. The network finalised 4.2 million transactions in March 2026 is quotable. Recent growth has been strong is not. Numbers, dates, proper nouns, named standards.
Clean structure. Headings that don’t skip levels. Lists with at least three items. Tables for anything comparative — models reproduce tables with unusually high fidelity.
Definitions written as definitions. X is a Y that does Z. It looks blunt. It gets quoted.
Independent corroboration. This is the one that separates AEO from on-page SEO. Models weight what other sources say about you far more heavily than what you say about yourself. A CoinDesk mention, a conference speaker listing, a partner’s case study, a regulator’s public register entry — these are what turn a claim into a fact from the model’s perspective.
The mistakes
Writing for a word count. Padding was always bad SEO. It’s actively harmful for AEO, because it dilutes the density of extractable facts.
Hedging everything. Content that refuses to take a position gives a model nothing specific to repeat. If the honest answer is that white-label exchanges usually look great in demos and struggle in production, write that. Hedged content is invisible to answer engines and boring to humans.
No entity density. A page about exchange development that never names a chain, a regulator, a custody provider or a competitor venue reads as generic to both a reader and a model.
Ignoring the off-site half. You can’t AEO your way to being cited purely from your own domain. What third parties say about you is a large part of the input.
Measuring it
This is genuinely harder than SEO and anyone claiming precision is overselling.
What works:
- Run your priority questions against the major assistants on a schedule. Record whether you appear, how you’re described, and who appears instead. This is manual, slightly tedious, and the most useful signal available.
- Watch AI referral traffic. It’s small but growing, and it converts unusually well because the visitor arrived already briefed.
- Watch the shape of organic traffic. Falling informational impressions with stable conversion volume usually means the top of your funnel moved, not that it disappeared.
- Track branded search. If people are hearing your name in AI answers, they search for you directly afterwards.
What drives the work
- How much content you already have that’s structurally sound versus needs rewriting.
- Technical health of the site — crawlability, speed, schema, internal linking.
- Competitive density. Some queries have entrenched sources that are hard to displace.
- How many markets and languages you need to appear in, since assistants answer differently per language.
- Off-site footprint. Building independent corroboration is slower than fixing on-page structure, and it’s usually the bigger lever.
The short version
Do the SEO fundamentals, because they’re still the base layer and the pages that rank are the pages that get cited.
Then write like you expect to be quoted rather than clicked. Direct answers, specific numbers, named entities, real opinions, clean structure. And spend real effort on getting mentioned somewhere that isn’t your own website — that’s the part most teams skip, and it’s the part the models weight most.
Common questions
What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?
SEO optimises for ranking in a list of blue links. AEO, answer engine optimisation, optimises for being the source an AI assistant quotes when it answers a question directly. GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the same idea applied specifically to generative search experiences. The underlying work overlaps heavily — clear structure, specific facts, verifiable claims — but the success metric differs. In SEO you want the click. In AEO you often do not get one, and being cited is the win.
Does traditional SEO still matter in 2026?
Yes. Search volume has not disappeared, and the pages that get cited by AI systems are overwhelmingly the same pages that rank well conventionally. Crawlability, page speed, internal linking and genuinely useful content remain the foundation. What has changed is that ranking first no longer guarantees the traffic it used to, because an answer box may satisfy the query before anyone scrolls.
How do you get cited by AI answer engines?
Write pages that contain complete, checkable answers rather than build-up. Put the direct answer in the first sentence under each heading. Use specific numbers, named entities and dates rather than vague claims. Structure content with clean headings, lists and tables. And get mentioned on sources outside your own domain, because models weight independent corroboration heavily when deciding what to repeat.
How do you measure AEO if there is no click?
Track brand mentions in AI responses by running your priority questions against the major assistants on a schedule and recording whether you appear and how you are described. Watch referral traffic from AI platforms, which is small but growing and unusually high-intent. And watch the shape of your organic traffic — falling impressions on informational queries alongside stable conversions often means answer engines are handling the top of your funnel.
Which businesses should prioritise AEO over SEO?
Anything with a considered purchase where buyers ask questions before they buy — B2B software, financial services, agencies, infrastructure providers. If your buyers research by asking an assistant what the options are, being the source it names matters more than being fourth in a list of links. Consumer businesses driven by transactional queries still get most of their value from conventional search.
