WTF are GEO and AEO? (and how they differ from SEO)

Confused? Here’s an explainer: 

WTF is GEO and is it the same as AEO?

This is such a new area, that currently there is no common taxonomy. So agencies, publishers, marketers and SEO specialists have adopted a bunch of different acronyms to describe the same trend – AEO, GEO and GSO for starters – and they all mean the same thing. (Not to be confused with AIO, which is Google’s AI Overviews.) Some are looking even further ahead – at agentic engine optimization. But that’s for another day, and another article. 

In a nutshell, what all three of these acronyms represent is how all brands – whether you’re a publisher, a marketer, an e-commerce site – ensure that AI crawlers can easily understand enough information about your brand in order to surface it in the synthesized answers they curate within their answer engines. If that’s part of your strategy.  “AI has already radically changed what search means, not just in terms of the look and feel perspective, but also in terms of what search is, the kinds of queries or asks,” said Tom Critchlow, evp of audience growth at ad management and creator monetization platform Raptive.

Will it replace SEO then? 

Hell no, search is still far too ubiquitous and deep-rooted, but this is being developed alongside it and is being regarded as a strategic imperative by SEO experts. But there is no standardization around it yet, and certainly no playbook. No doubt, that will change fast. “Everyone sitting on their hands and doing nothing is not an option,” said Edward Cowell, global vp of Organic Practices at Group M. 

So how does it compare with SEO? 

Traditional SEO has centered on finding ways to make your website appear high up within the search indexes when people are looking for specific things online, measured with CTRs. GEO/AEO/GSO is more about ensuring the AI crawlers have enough information to be able to answer a potentially more complex question written by the user, within an AI engine itself. “GSO is really more about understanding what is happening within that AI result, the response that’s been generated from your prompt, how your brand is represented there, whether or not it’s linking back, whether or not it’s citing your content or your brand correctly, and whether the information is accurate,” said Cowell. 

What do AI bot crawlers look for, and how does that compare to traditional search crawlers? 

In comparison to search engine crawlers, the large language models and their crawlers are still “pretty crude,” given the head start search engines have had, said Cowell. 

That means they do have issues around being able to access all the content from some websites. An option getting talked about is just how far a brand should go in making its website content simpler and easier for AI engines to pick up. Currently, you can, for example, upload all the raw data from a website into LLMS.txt to make it available to the LLM – a bit like the flip side of robots.txt. 

How do you optimize for AI engines versus search engines?

Much of it comes down to the fact that the kinds of questions users are putting into AI engines like ChatGPT are radically different from what they would typically type into search. 

That’s what some SEO buffs now refer to as “long-tail queries” – lengthy prompts that an individual writes into an AI engine, which delivers a synthesized answer, instead of a more simplified, keyword-based question that a user would typically write into a search engine to deliver a site to click through to. 

“We have very little data on what those [long-tail] searches are and they’re very hard to predict,” said Mollie Ellerton, head of SEO at digital optimization agency Hookflash. “The difficulty, at the moment, is that there aren’t any Webmaster tools that report on performance within AI overviews. So Google gives us no data on AI overviews. Similarly, we don’t get reports that we can dig into from ChatGPT, for example. So already we’re a little bit blind,” she added. 

Are there any workarounds?

Some yes, though they’re likely not 100% accurate. “A quicker win, especially if you’re a content marketer, if you’re writing a piece on a specific topic, is to go to Reddit and look at what people are saying around that topic,” said Ellerton. 

“We’re starting to think about how we can start to scrape that as well, just to start to understand what people are searching there, what kind of conversations are coming up, but then also looking in TikTok, and seeing what people are asking [around that topic].” She believes that a content creator can then have a deeper understanding of how to tailor their content to the types of questions people are asking on these platforms, and possibly have a better chance of surfacing prominently in an AI engine as a result. 

Given AI engines are slowly eroding publisher traffic, is this something publishers should even be doing? 

There is the rub. And it depends entirely on the individual publisher’s stance. Content creators in general have a different ax to grind with AI engines, with many large publishers having made licensing deals with AI companies. Whereas, non-media brands like e-commerce sites have more incentive to appear in the AI engines. Ensuring brand awareness is high within the answer engines and that the information associated with that brand is accurate and highly visible will be key even if CTRs drop, stressed Cowell. “We believe that the value [of those who do end up clicking through] will be higher, even if the volume of clicks has dropped,” he added. A committed purchaser, in other words. 

But will this worsen diminishing CTRs for publishers and content creators? 

Critchlow believes optimizing for AI engines is a far more complex question for publsihers than it is for an e-commerce site, for instance. “For a lot of independent publishers and content creators, the number of clicks that are coming out of those platforms is vanishing,” he said. “And so the real question isn’t so much how to optimize for this but whether you should be optimizing for these [AI] platforms.”

He pointed to recipe publishers as an example of those badly affected by falling CTRs, courtesy of AI. “If you ask any of the AI platforms – AI mode, Gemini, ChatpGPT, or Perplexity, for recipe content, they will hallucinate one. Some of them have links as kind of citations or footnotes, but none of them are sending any significant traffic out to the web. So if you’re a recipe publisher, none of these platforms are worth optimizing for,” he said. 

That said, it’s a trend publishers should keep an eye on, according to Sam Gould, AI lead at FT Strategies, the consulting arm of the Financial Times. “The main thing that’s unchanged is that the overall outcome publishers are looking for, which is to protect their traffic and connect their current and future audiences, and so on, they’re looking for as many different tactics and advice as possible to achieve that. So it’s natural there are lots of questions emerging around, ‘how do I rank and get shown in AI engines’?”