AI SEO vs GEO vs AEO: What Actually Matters

Four labels are competing to name the same job: AI SEO, GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization) and AI visibility. Vendors will tell you they are different disciplines. Mostly they are not. Underneath all four sits one question with a measurable answer: can a machine fetch your page, read it, and act on what it says? We measure exactly that on 113 well-known sites every week, and send a real agent out to try. Here is what the labels actually mean and which parts are worth your time.

What each term means

• AI SEO — the broadest and most-searched label. Usually means "everything you do so AI systems surface your site", which spans classic technical SEO, content, and the machine-readable surfaces below.
• GEO — generative engine optimization — aimed at being cited inside generated answers (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, AI Overviews). Emphasis on being quotable: clear claims, facts near the top, citable structure.
• AEO — answer engine optimization — older term, from the featured-snippet and voice-assistant era. Emphasis on directly answering a specific question in a parseable block.
• AI visibility — the measurement side: are you actually appearing in AI answers, and how often. A reporting category more than a technique.

The honest version: one job, three layers

Strip the branding and every one of these resolves to the same stack, in strict order of dependency. Each layer is worthless if the one below it fails.

• 1 · Reachable — a plain HTTP request gets your page, not a bot challenge, not a login. If an agent cannot fetch it, nothing above this matters. This is where most sites actually fail.
• 2 · Readable — the answer is in the served HTML, not assembled by JavaScript afterwards. Prices, plans, cancellation steps, contact details.
• 3 · Quotable — once a machine can read it, structure makes it citable: a direct answer near the top, schema.org JSON-LD, a curated llms.txt, stable URLs.

GEO and AEO advice is almost entirely layer 3. That advice is sound — and completely wasted if you fail layers 1 or 2, which is the situation for a large share of the sites we audit.

What the data says

Across 113 well-known sites, average score 74/100:

• 7% block at least one major AI crawler in robots.txt, and 3% block essentially all of them. For those, every hour spent on GEO tactics is spent behind a locked door.
• Only 53% publish an llms.txt — the cheapest layer-3 win there is.
• In our weekly Field Test, the errands that fail almost never fail for lack of clever content. They fail on JavaScript-only pricing pages, bot walls on help centers, and cancellation flows you cannot even read without logging in. In the latest episode the agent hit 10 bot walls across 118 page reads.

So what should you actually do?

In this order. Stop when you run out of time — the order is the point.

• Unblock deliberately. Open your robots.txt and decide, on purpose, which AI crawlers you allow. Blocking everything is a legitimate business choice; blocking by accident is not.
• Server-render the money pages. Pricing, support, cancellation, legal. One curl should show the numbers.
• Link those four from the homepage with real anchors in the HTML.
• Ship llms.txt and JSON-LD. An afternoon's work, and it is the whole of what most GEO guides sell you.
• Then worry about quotability, phrasing, and being cited.

How to measure it without buying anything

You do not need an AI-visibility subscription to find out whether you are reachable and readable. Fetch your own pages the way an agent does:

curl -sL https://yourdomain.com/pricing | grep -o '$[0-9]*' | head

No prices, or a page titled "Just a moment", is your answer. Then look up your site on the Index for a check-by-check report, and read the full checklist for the fix to each failure.