SEO earns you a place in a list. AEO earns you a place in the answer.
Google’s results page ranks pages and lets the customer compare. An answer engine does the comparing for them and names a shortlist, sometimes one company.
What stays the same?
The inputs overlap: a sound site, clear content, consistent facts.
What changes?
The weighting. Rankings reward your pages; answers reward what the whole web says about you: press, analysts, reviews, Wikipedia, forums and structured data. You can be top of Google and absent from the answer.
It isn’t judging quality. It’s judging legibility.
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Four names, one question
SEO · search engine optimisation: a place in Google’s ranked results.
AEO · answer engine optimisation: being the answer an engine gives.
GEO · generative engine optimisation: cited and described accurately when a language model writes a response.
AIO · usually Google’s AI Overviews, the summary above the results; some vendors use it for “AI optimisation”.
Sudhir Sharma
A decade inside Google. Founder of Hupik, an AEO agency. Adjunct professor of digital marketing at SUSS.