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EXPLAINER · 5 MIN READ

AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what's the difference for a B2B company?

By the Seamwire team · Updated

THE SHORT ANSWER

SEO gets your pages ranked in search results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) and GEO (generative engine optimisation) get your company named inside the answers that AI assistants and Google's AI Overviews write. In practice AEO and GEO are one job, and it builds on SEO rather than replacing it: AI engines lean on search indexes and on what other sites say about you.

SEO: ranking pages

Search engine optimisation is the familiar work of making pages crawlable, relevant and trusted so they rank for the searches your buyers type. Success is measured in rankings, clicks and the enquiries they bring.

AEO and GEO: being the answer

Answer engines and generative engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Copilot, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode) do not show a list of ten pages. They write an answer and name a handful of companies or sources. AEO and GEO are the work of being one of those names.

The two terms came from different camps: AEO from search marketers, GEO from a 2023 research paper that coined “generative engine optimization”. The tactics are the same, so most practitioners now use them together.

Where they overlap, and where they don't

  • Shared: a crawlable, fast, well-structured site; clear pages for each service and question; a strong reputation off your own site.
  • AEO/GEO adds: letting AI crawlers in (some are blocked by default), writing answer-first passages that can be quoted, earning mentions on the reviews, lists and publications AI engines cite, and measuring how often you are named across repeated runs.
  • AEO/GEO cares less about: exact-match keywords and a single #1 position. Answers vary from run to run, so the measure is your share of answers.

What a B2B company should do first

  • Fix the basics: crawler access, server-rendered pages, one clear page per service and industry.
  • List the 20 to 50 questions buyers ask before they call you, and check which engines name you today.
  • Earn mentions where your buyers' questions are answered: directories, lists, trade press, communities.
  • Report named-share and AI-referred leads monthly, not a vanity “AI score”.

SOURCES

  1. 1Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization (KDD 2024)
  2. 2Google, AI features and your website
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