Are AEO and GEO the same thing?

In practice the activities overlap almost entirely. The terms differ in origin: GEO comes from a 2023 research paper about generative engines, AEO from earlier work on featured snippets and voice answers. Anyone treating them as two separate budgets should be asked to name the work that belongs to only one of them.

Is GEO about geography?

No, though the collision is unfortunate. In this context GEO means generative engine optimisation. In advertising, geo usually means geographic targeting, which is why some writers avoid the abbreviation entirely.

Which term should I put on my own service page?

The one your buyers type. On current search volume that is AEO for most markets, with generative engine optimisation spelled out once for the readers who use it. Define whichever you choose in the first sentence so an answer engine can quote the definition with your name attached.

The acronyms

AEO vs GEO vs LLMO: three names, how much difference?

One of these came out of a research paper, one out of the SEO industry, and one out of agency positioning. The practical gap between them is smaller than the vocabulary suggests.

The short answer

GEO is the academic term, defined in a 2023 paper on optimising content for generative engines. AEO came from the older idea of winning featured snippets and voice answers. LLMO is mostly a rebrand of the same activity. Where they differ is scope rather than method: GEO writing tends to be about generated answers specifically, AEO about direct answers of any kind, including ones that predate chatbots.

What ranked on 18 September 2026: Searching for generative engine optimisation returns the arXiv paper at the top, with Wikipedia and Google's own optimisation guide close behind. Searching for the agency version of the same phrase returns almost entirely UK agency service pages. The same term has an academic SERP and a commercial one, and they barely overlap.

Where each term came from

The provenance matters because it explains why the definitions disagree. One is a technical contribution with a benchmark attached. The others are market language that spread because it sold.

GEO entered the literature with Aggarwal and colleagues in 2023, framed as a black-box optimisation problem: given a generative engine you cannot inspect, what changes to a source document raise the chance it is used
AEO predates the current wave. It described optimising for featured snippets, knowledge panels and voice assistants, all of which answered without a click years before ChatGPT
LLMO arrived with agency positioning in 2024 and 2025 and has no independent definition worth defending

What the paper actually claims

The GEO paper reports that its methods raised source visibility in generated responses by up to forty percent. That number is quoted constantly without its conditions, which are the interesting part: it was measured on the authors' own benchmark of queries against generative engines of the day, using specific content edits, not on client websites over time.

The edits that performed best were adding citations, quotations and statistics to a source document
Keyword stuffing performed badly, which is worth noting given how much current advice amounts to it
The engines tested have since been replaced by newer models, so the size of the effect today is unknown even if the direction holds

Choosing a word to use in public

This matters less than vendors imply, but there is a defensible answer. Use the word your reader already searches, and define it in the first line so that a machine quoting you does not have to guess.

In technical or research contexts, GEO is the term with a citable origin
For buyers, AEO is the phrase with more commercial search volume and a longer history
Avoid inventing a fourth acronym, which is how this field ended up needing a comparison page in the first place

The same work, three framings

	GEO	AEO
Origin	Research paper, 2023	SEO practice, pre-2020
Scope	Generated answers from LLM-backed engines	Any direct answer, including snippets and voice
Strongest published evidence	Benchmark study with a stated method	Years of snippet practice, little of it controlled
Who uses the word	Researchers, some tooling vendors	Agencies, buyers, most search volume
Risk of the term	Confused with geographic targeting	Confused with customs accreditation

What to do with this

01Pick one term, define it on the page, and stop there. A buyer comparing three vendors who each use a different acronym for identical work is being sold vocabulary.
02If a vendor claims GEO is a separate discipline from AEO, ask what they do under one that they do not do under the other. A specific answer exists in rare cases, usually around prompt-level monitoring. Most of the time there is no answer.
03Read the paper before quoting the forty percent figure at anyone, including at yourself.

Questions

Are AEO and GEO the same thing?: In practice the activities overlap almost entirely. The terms differ in origin: GEO comes from a 2023 research paper about generative engines, AEO from earlier work on featured snippets and voice answers. Anyone treating them as two separate budgets should be asked to name the work that belongs to only one of them.
Is GEO about geography?: No, though the collision is unfortunate. In this context GEO means generative engine optimisation. In advertising, geo usually means geographic targeting, which is why some writers avoid the abbreviation entirely.
Which term should I put on my own service page?: The one your buyers type. On current search volume that is AEO for most markets, with generative engine optimisation spelled out once for the readers who use it. Define whichever you choose in the first sentence so an answer engine can quote the definition with your name attached.

Working on this yourself and want a second opinion? Tell me what you are seeing, or read the AEO Playbook for the full framework.