Fluens AI
Answer engine optimization

AEO and GEO are the same job under two names

If you came here asking what is AEO, or whether you need answer engine optimization as well as generative engine optimization: they describe the same work. Here is what that work actually is, how to tell whether anyone is really doing it, and what to ask an AEO agency before you hire one.

The short answer
AEO, GEO and LLMO are three labels for getting named in an AI-generated answer.
Nobody should sell you two of them. If an agency quotes separately for AEO and GEO, they are selling the same deliverable twice.
The labels

Where the three names came from

Useful to know mainly so you can tell when a vendor is inventing a distinction to sell against.
AEO

Answer Engine Optimization

Coined when the surface people worried about was a featured snippet or a voice assistant reading one answer aloud. It stretched naturally to cover AI answers.

GEO

Generative Engine Optimization

Came out of a 2023 academic paper and spread through the SEO industry. It emphasises that the answer is generated rather than retrieved from a single page.

LLMO

Large Language Model Optimization

The most literal of the three and the least used. Names the model rather than the surface, which is slightly wrong — what you are optimizing for is retrieval into an answer.

The work

What answer engine optimization actually involves

Four things, whichever acronym is on the invoice.
01

Be in the sources the answer is built from

Comparison articles, review platforms, forum threads and trade press. These decide whether you are a candidate at all, and most of them are not yours.

02

Be correct where you already appear

Assistants routinely quote pricing, features and positioning that went out of date two releases ago. The fix is at the source, not on your own pricing page.

03

Answer the question plainly and early

A page that states its answer in the first sentence under a heading gets lifted more often than a better page that buries it in paragraph six.

04

Measure by how often you are named

Not by position, because there is no list. Ask the same question repeatedly across engines and count. One answer is noise; a rate is a position.

Start by finding out where you stand

We ask every major assistant the questions your buyers ask and read the answers back to you.
Schedule your free auditThe full explanation of GEO →

Common questions

What is AEO?
AEO stands for answer engine optimization. It is the work of getting your business named when an AI assistant or search engine answers a question outright instead of returning links. If you have also seen GEO and wondered which you need, the answer is that they are the same thing under two labels.
What is answer engine optimization?
Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the work of getting your business named when an AI assistant or search engine answers a question directly rather than returning a list of links. In practice that means being present in the third-party sources the answer is assembled from, being described correctly in them, and publishing pages that state their answers plainly enough to be quoted.
What is the difference between AEO and GEO?
Almost nothing. The two labels came from different places — AEO from the featured-snippet and voice-assistant era, GEO from a 2023 research paper — and settled on the same work. Agencies pick whichever term their clients search for. If someone tells you AEO and GEO require different services, ask them to name a single task that appears in one and not the other.
Is AEO the same as SEO?
No. SEO works to rank your page in a list of links. AEO is about whether an assistant names you in a single answer that may link to nobody at all. The tactics overlap where good content helps both, but the decisive sources differ: most of what an assistant says about a brand comes from sites the brand does not own.
Which term should I use internally?
Whichever your team will actually say out loud. We use GEO because it is the term that has spread furthest, but we answer to all of them. The label matters far less than whether anyone is doing the work.