Short answer
Generative engine optimization is the practice of increasing how often a brand or page is used as a source by generative AI systems. It is frequently used interchangeably with AEO; where people distinguish the two, AEO covers direct-answer formats inside search engines and GEO covers the wider ecosystem of generative assistants.
Also called: GEO
The distinction is more useful as a description of surfaces than as a real methodological split. Featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes are search-engine features with known rules; ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity synthesise across sources with no published ranking system. The levers that move both are the same: extractable passages, original data, entity consistency, and third-party corroboration.
One practical consequence of the ecosystem framing: source overlap between engines is low, so presence on one is a poor proxy for presence on another. Coverage has to be built across the kinds of sources each engine leans on — your own site, directories, review platforms, forums, and press — rather than optimised once and assumed to travel.
Common questions
Is GEO the same thing as AEO?
In most usage, yes. Where writers separate them, AEO refers to winning direct-answer formats inside search engines and GEO to being cited across generative assistants generally. The optimisation work overlaps almost entirely, so treating them as one discipline with two surfaces is the practical approach.
Where this comes up in our work
Related terms
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring content so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Google AI Overviews — cite it inside their generated answers.
AI Overviews
AI Overviews are Google’s generated summaries shown above the traditional results for many queries, assembled from multiple web sources and displayed with links to them.
Entity SEO
Entity SEO is the practice of making a search engine resolve a business, person or product as one distinct thing rather than a set of unconnected mentions.
llms.txt
llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file at a site’s root that offers language models a curated map of its most useful pages, in Markdown, without navigation and boilerplate.
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