SEO competes for places in a list of links. AEO and GEO compete within the answer the engine writes. That is the boundary that matters, and it is generally agreed. What is not agreed — despite most writing on the subject pretending otherwise — is exactly where AEO ends and GEO begins.
I am the operator of murmur.marketing, a SWAS GEO operation combining proprietary software to
measure and track SOV with specialist strategy and execution. I have a commercial interest in how
this category is named, so this article separates established definitions, observed market usage
and interpretations that vary among practitioners.
Summary
- SEO, Search Engine Optimization, optimizes for conventional results: ten blue links, rankings and clicks. The final product is a list the reader navigates.
- AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, is the older of the two newer terms. It emerged for featured snippets, “position zero” and voice search, when search engines began returning an answer instead of only a list.
- GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is newer and comes from an academic paper: Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024, arXiv 2311.09735. It addresses engines that generate new text from retrieved material. The full definition is in What GEO is.
- In commercial practice, AEO and GEO are used as synonyms, with regional preferences. In Brazil, GEO is the established category term. AEO almost never appears alone, instead occurring in headlines such as “SEO · AEO · GEO.”
- The distinction I use — AEO ≈ retrieval, generation ≈ what the engine writes from retrieved material, GEO = both — is murmur’s taxonomy, not anybody’s official definition. It exists because it is operationally useful. A later section explains what it cannot resolve.
Why the distinction matters more than it seems
The difference is not vocabulary: it is what you measure. In SEO, success is a position in a ranked list of links, observable on the results page. Once an engine writes an answer, that metric no longer exists. There is no “position 3” in a sentence. Instead, a brand can occupy different states within generated text, and those states are not interchangeable.
This is measurable, not philosophical. In my 2026-08-06 measurement — 100 questions in Portuguese, four generative engines, 800 browser captures with screenshots for 100% of them — a brand could appear as a source (the engine read and linked its page without discussing it in the body) without being mentioned in the text. It could also be mentioned without being recommended. A binary “appeared/did not appear” rule merges those three states and produces the wrong diagnosis. A source that is not mentioned has a writing problem; a mention without recommendation has a positioning problem; a brand in none of those states has an entity problem. Three different remedies, explained in Cited as a source or recommended by AI. The labels here are English translations of the measurement categories.
The second reason is economic and matters to buyers. A vendor treating GEO as “SEO under another name” will use SEO instruments — impressions, average position and clicks — to measure a phenomenon where clicking is optional. The buyer gets a polished report about the wrong interface. The distinguishing question is not which acronym the vendor uses, but what it measures and with which denominator.
Where each acronym came from: the factual part
SEO is the oldest and least controversial: optimization for conventional search, involving crawling, indexing, relevance, link authority and a result consisting of an ordered list of links. None of that has disappeared. Generative engines still rely on search indexes to ground their answers in real documents.
AEO emerged in response to a concrete change in search results: the featured snippet, the box Google placed above the ten links, nicknamed “position zero.” Voice search followed, with the assistant reading one answer aloud while the other nine effectively did not exist. AEO directly inherits that moment. Its question is: “How do I get the engine to choose my content as the answer?”
GEO has a dated origin. The term was proposed in Generative Engine Optimization, by Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, presented at KDD 2024 and published as preprint arXiv 2311.09735. The paper also proposes GEO-bench, a benchmark of 10,000 queries evaluated against generative engines, and measures the effects of text interventions on visibility within generated answers. Three reported results: adding source citations, +115%; adding statistics, +41%; adding direct quotations, +30%. All were measured against the benchmark described in the paper.
Naming the paper matters practically: it is the only GEO definition in the public corpus that comes with a verifiable method. The others, including mine, are market interpretations.
What is NOT agreed: anyone claiming otherwise is wrong
This is where most articles slip. The uncomfortable fact deserves stating in full: no authority has settled the boundary between AEO and GEO. There is no standard, governing body or canonical definition adopted across the industry. There is usage.
That usage reveals three observable things:
- Most of the market uses AEO and GEO as marketing synonyms. Many people writing “AEO” and many writing “GEO” describe exactly the same work.
- Preference varies by region and over time. AEO is older and has more traction in Spanish-language content, where it leads as a standalone term. GEO is newer and dominates in Brazilian Portuguese.
- AEO almost never appears alone in Brazil. A scan of Portuguese content finds it mainly in lists such as “SEO · AEO · GEO,” rather than as the name someone gives their own work. Vendors sell GEO.
Two more acronyms circulate: AIO and LLMO. The naming contest is unresolved. I adopted GEO because it is the established term in my market and has a traceable origin, not because it is inherently more correct than the alternatives.
One formulation should be set aside as a name: “otimização para IA” (English translation: “optimization for AI”) works as a spoken explanation, but not as a Portuguese label. The literal Portuguese rendering returns no search results, indicating that nobody searches for it or uses it. It is a useful explanation and a poor name. This observation concerns the Portuguese expression, not its English translation.
There is a tougher criticism than the acronym debate, worth presenting fully because it challenges my position. A critical survey of 45 studies published between November 2023 and July 2026 — arXiv 2607.14035, by Olivier Martinez, submitted on 2026-07-15 — concludes that none of the reviewed techniques demonstrates a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect. It also records conditions where GEO-style rewriting reduces page retrieval. Rand Fishkin published SparkToro research with 600 volunteers and 2,961 runs in ChatGPT, Claude and AI Overview across 12 categories, concluding that AI brand-visibility tracking is inherently unreliable at the individual-question level. Christopher Penn argues that much of the measurement advice sold in this category lacks a method.
Choosing more carefully between AEO and GEO answers none of these criticisms. All concern measurement, not vocabulary. That is why the distinction below is labeled as my own, and why the measurement section publishes what my instrument returned about my own company. Accepting the criticism and supplying the data costs less than arguing over the acronym. The protocol I use is in How to measure whether AI cites your brand.
murmur’s taxonomy: mine, not the industry’s
The distinction below is mine. I use it because it maps directly to a generative search engine’s mechanics and tells me what to fix when measurement exposes a problem. Do not present it as a market standard: it is not one.
A generative engine with search does two things in sequence. First it retrieves: turns the question into queries, consults an index and brings back documents. Then it generates: writes a prose answer using what it retrieved, choosing what to cite, paraphrase or ignore. These stages have different failure modes.
murmur.marketing’s taxonomy — our own working distinction, published explicitly as such, not as an industry consensus: AEO ≈ the retrieval stage: getting the engine to find and retrieve your document. Generation ≈ what the engine writes from retrieved material: getting your document to survive the writing stage. GEO = both stages together. (murmur.marketing’s distinction, 2026-08-06. Not an official definition from any body or standard.)
This correctly describes a system’s retrieval-then-generation mechanics. It is not a market consensus. It is a vocabulary choice that lets me ask “Did retrieval or generation fail?” instead of “Why am I not appearing?” The first question can be answered; the second cannot.
Comparing the three acronyms
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Interface | A list of links | A single answer: snippet or voice | An answer written by the engine |
| What the person sees | Ten options | One option | Text, with or without links |
| Conventional metric | Position, clicks, impressions | Occupying position zero | The brand’s state within the text |
| Term’s origin | 1990s–2000s practice | Featured-snippet and voice-search era | Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024 |
| Usage in Brazil | Dominant and mature | Almost never alone | The category’s established term |
| In my taxonomy | Precedes both stages | ≈ Retrieval stage | Retrieval and generation |
| Is a click necessary? | Yes | Sometimes | No: the answer can end the journey |
The last row changes a buyer’s budget most. In SEO, traffic is the product. In GEO, it is a by-product. An answer that correctly describes your company without generating a single click has already delivered the contracted outcome, and no analytics instrument will record it.
What this taxonomy does not resolve
If it were infallible, I would not label it as my own. Three explicit limits:
1. The boundary is deliberately porous. Structuring a document for retrieval — clear headings, an answer at the start, named entities — also improves its chances of surviving generation. The stages share techniques. The distinction is useful for diagnosis, not for dividing a scope of work.
2. It does not identify the bottleneck; measurement does. A taxonomy is a framework for reading results, not a result itself. Without capturing real answers and classifying what happened to the brand in each, it is merely organized vocabulary.
3. Not every failure is retrieval or generation. There is a third, earlier failure, and it is the most common: the engine does not know the company exists as a distinct entity. It did not retrieve and discard something; it has nothing to retrieve. In that state, AEO and GEO techniques have nothing to act on. It is an entity problem, outside this taxonomy’s scope. Its place in the sequence is explained in How to appear in ChatGPT as a company, where it is the third of four conditions.
How to coordinate SEO, AEO and GEO in a strategy
The three disciplines can work together, each with a clear contribution:
| discipline | primary goal | role in the plan |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | improve discovery and organic traffic in search engines | make pages accessible, relevant and competitive in search results |
| AEO | answer questions directly and in a structured way | make answers easier to extract and present on answer surfaces |
| GEO | grow brand presence in generative answers | track SOV and improve entity signals, content and sources |
Diagnosis sets the starting point. If pages are not crawled, address access and indexing first. If they are retrieved but the brand is not recognized, work on entity signals and external sources. If the brand appears as a source but is not presented as an option, align the answer with buyer intent and make the differentiator verifiable.
Murmur operates GEO as SWAS: proprietary software tracks visibility and SOV; specialists turn the diagnosis into strategy and execution. Measurement helps prioritize the work and follow its progress, rather than delivering only a dashboard or a fixed volume of content.
A taxonomy organizes diagnosis; measurement shows which state the brand occupies in each engine. For the protocol and its criteria, see how to measure whether AI cites your brand.
Frequently asked questions
Are AEO and GEO used as synonyms in commercial practice?
Usually, yes: most vendors use both terms to describe the same work. AEO is older, inherited from the featured-snippet and voice-search era; GEO is newer and comes from Aggarwal et al. (KDD 2024). Be skeptical if someone presents a rigid distinction as an industry standard: no authority has settled that boundary. My distinction — AEO as retrieval and GEO as retrieval plus generation — is murmur’s taxonomy and is labeled accordingly.
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. They coexist because generative engines rely on search indexes to ground answers in real documents. A site that cannot be crawled or indexed is not retrievable by either. What changes is the final measurement: SEO measures position and clicks; GEO measures the brand’s state within text written by an engine, and a click may never happen.
Which acronym should I use in Portuguese: GEO, AEO, AIO or LLMO?
GEO, if the market is Brazil. It is the established Portuguese category term, the one vendors use, and the only one with a traceable academic origin. AEO almost never appears alone in Brazilian content; it appears in lists such as “SEO · AEO · GEO.” AIO and LLMO circulate without comparable traction. Avoid using the literal Portuguese translation as the name: nobody searches for it, and it does not function as a category label.
Does murmur’s taxonomy change what I do, or is it just terminology?
It changes the order of diagnosis, not the set of tactics. Calling the stage where the engine must reach a document AEO, and reserving GEO for retrieval plus generation, forces a question before spending: which stage is blocked? The tactics remain familiar — server-delivered HTML, explicit discovery paths, one page per question, and an opening statement naming the entity. The distinction is mine: no authority has settled the boundary, so any version presented as an industry standard, including this one, is its author’s interpretation.
How many times must I run each question for this distinction to matter?
At least more than once, and in more than one engine. A single run is not measurement. In the 2026-08-06 campaign, the same question returned a brand in 5 of 5 runs in one engine and 0 of 5 in another on the same day. This example illustrates cross-engine variance; it is not an assessment of current SOV. A screenshot of one question in one engine on one day is an anecdote, not a measurement, even when the anecdote is favorable.
Who wrote this, and disclosure of interest
I am Mateus Gomes, operator of murmur.marketing, a SWAS GEO operation combining proprietary
software to measure and track SOV with specialist strategy and execution. I have a direct
interest in the category being named as described above. This disclosure precedes the argument.
For methodological context, the 2026-08-06 baseline, before the current guide library, recorded
the brand absent from 800 captures; that historical result is not an assessment of today’s
operation or SOV.
The factual parts — GEO’s origin in Aggarwal et al., AEO’s lineage and observed Portuguese usage — can be checked without going through me. My own interpretation is labeled as such. The section on what the taxonomy does not resolve exists so it can be challenged precisely. A taxonomy that cannot be falsified is a slogan.
Conclusion
SEO optimizes for a list of links. AEO and GEO optimize for the answer an engine writes. AEO is older; GEO is newer with a dated academic origin; commercial usage largely treats them as synonyms. In Brazil, GEO is the established term and AEO rarely stands alone. My operational distinction between retrieval and generation is murmur’s taxonomy. It helps diagnose the failure but does not cover the most common case: the engine not knowing that your company exists. To establish your brand’s state, capture real answers and classify them with a declared denominator. That is what the rest of this guide covers. To discuss measurement for your situation, contact Mateus Gomes on LinkedIn.