Glossary › GEO
GEO — generative engine optimization
GEO is the same discipline as AEO, named for the generative side of the machine rather than the answering side.
The two labels arrived from different directions and now cover nearly the same ground. If a vendor distinguishes them, the usual split is that AEO aims at direct answers and citations, while GEO aims at being represented inside longer generated text. In a buying conversation you can treat them as interchangeable and ask the harder question instead: what does the vendor measure, and against what baseline.
Be aware of the collision: geo also means geographic, so “GEO services” and “geo targeting” are unrelated things sharing three letters. Context is doing a lot of work in that acronym.
disambiguation
What GEO is not
- It is not a different mechanism from AEO. The interventions that get tested are the same interventions: what is in the bytes of the page the machine fetched.
- It is not local search. Geographic targeting is a separate subject that happens to share the prefix.
free audit
See what AI sees on your site
Vocabulary is cheap. The measurement is the part that tells you whether any of it applies to your site.
One model fetches your homepage and answers buyer questions from it. You get the recovery score and the specific answers it could not find. That is the whole free tier: it shows you the problem, and the fix package is not included.