I'm Gen Furukawa, founder of SuperMarketers. We track our own pages and the AI answers about them.
What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?
What is SEO?
SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of earning a ranked link on Google's results page.
What is AEO?
AEO (answer engine optimization) is the work of getting your company named and cited inside AI answers in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews and AI Mode.
What is GEO?
GEO (generative engine optimization) is the term from a KDD 2024 paper by Aggarwal and colleagues for page content changes that make generative engines quote a page. The paper reported visibility gains of up to 40% in generative engine responses.
| Dimension | SEO | AEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the buyer sees it | A ranked link on Google | A named answer from an AI engine | The same AI answers |
| What it earns | A click to your site | A mention or a citation in the answer | A higher chance AI engines quote your page |
| What you measure | Search Console clicks, impressions and position | Whether you are named and cited across your list of buyer questions | The same list, plus which page changes moved it |
| What you change | Pages, links and technical health | Page structure, schema, entity clarity and mentions on other sites | Page content: cited sources and plain definitions |
How is AEO different from SEO?
SEO competes for a position in a list of links. AEO competes for a name inside one composed answer, and that answer draws on other sites as well as yours. The work underneath is the same, and it comes down to 4 things:
- 01One page per buyer questionName the question in the heading and answer it on that page.
- 02The answer in the first two linesReaders on a phone and AI engines both take the opening and leave.
- 03Schema and one plain description of who you areThe same sentence on your site and your profiles.
- 04Proof a stranger can checkNamed customers, dated numbers and linked sources.
In our Oyster case study, Oyster got 11x more AI citations and 110% more organic clicks from pages it had already published.
How is GEO different from SEO?
GEO (generative engine optimization) changes page content so a generative engine quotes it. The page work is the same 4 things listed above.
Searches for "geo vs seo" also return local SEO pages: 2 of the first 8 results on November 5, 2026 had local SEO in the title (US, desktop).
How is AEO different from GEO?
GEO is the narrower term. It covers the on-page signals that decide whether an engine pulls from your page: cited sources, plain definitions and clear structure. AEO is the practitioner term for getting named in AI answers, and it adds 2 layers GEO leaves out: technical access (schema, robots.txt rules for AI crawlers and llms.txt) and how other sites describe you.
One plan covers both. A separate GEO plan would rewrite the same pages, the same company description and the same outside mentions.
What do ChatGPT and Gemini say to invest in first?
I asked both: "SEO or AEO: which should a B2B SaaS company invest in first?" I ran it 3 times on each engine in each of 2 rounds, on October 27 and November 2, 2026. That is 12 answers, from one of the tracked questions in our public experiment, Earning the Shortlist.
All 12 put SEO first or as the foundation. 10 said SEO first outright. 2 Gemini answers said you cannot choose one over the other in isolation and kept SEO as the base. None said AEO first.
ChatGPT, November 2, run 1: "My recommendation: Invest in SEO first, then build AEO into your SEO strategy from day one."
Gemini, November 2, run 1: "SEO (Search Engine Optimization) first, but with an AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) mindset from day one." Its reason: "If you haven’t built foundational domain authority and ranking equity through SEO, AI search engines will not reference your product."
Agreement is no proof. One question on two engines is a small sample. Both ran through the consumer apps, ChatGPT logged out and Gemini on Flash-Lite, and answers vary by day. Only 3 of the 12 answers cited any source, all from ChatGPT.
Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?
SEO still sends clicks, and fewer of them when an AI summary appears. Pew Research Center tracked 900 US adults and 68,879 Google searches, mostly in March 2025. Users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared and in 15% of visits when it did not. AI summaries appeared on about 18% of the searches.
On our side, Google showed an AI Overview for 44 of the 47 keywords we track, in the report dated November 2, 2026. It showed one for all 6 phrasings of this comparison when I checked on November 5 (US, desktop).
Pew measured all kinds of Google searches by US adults in one month. Our 47 keywords are our own list. Both show direction only.
SEO or AEO: which should a B2B SaaS company invest in first?
Invest in the work they share first, in this order:
- Rewrite the pages that already get impressionsAnswer the question in the first two lines, add proof and add schema. This costs your team's time and no new tool.
- Write one page for each buyer question you want to be named forUse the words buyers type into ChatGPT. How to choose the questions.
- Start a fixed list of buyer questions and ask it every weekSearch Console reports clicks and impressions from Google. It does not record whether ChatGPT named you, so the list is your record of that. How to track it.
- Add the AEO-only workEarn mentions on pages other than your own. In our test, the sources ChatGPT cited were other sites: developers.google.com, semrush.com, blog.hubspot.com and others.
| Where you are | Fund first | Why |
|---|---|---|
| No pages ranking or cited | Steps 1 and 2 on your most important buyer questions | Search Console has no data until the pages exist. |
| Pages get impressions and few clicks | Step 1 | They already hold a position. Our version of this page sat at position 3.6 for "seo vs aeo: which should a b2b saas invest in first" with 15 impressions and 0 clicks in the 28 days to November 2, 2026. |
| Rankings hold and buyers ask AI who to hire | Steps 3 and 4 | The list shows where a competitor is named instead of you. |
How do you measure SEO, AEO and GEO?
For SEO, use Search Console: clicks, impressions and position for each page. For AEO and GEO, use a fixed list of buyer questions, asked every week on each engine and recorded as named, cited or absent. Lock the list and date it, because a reworded question is a different test.
How does SuperMarketers decide what to fund first?
We start every client with a Foundation month, built in their own tools and theirs to keep. On this site, a weekly Search Console report lists the pages to fix first: the ones with many impressions and few clicks. You can check where you stand with the 30-minute AI visibility audit, or see the services we run for B2B SaaS teams.