Now the industry has handed us AEO, AIO and GEO — Answer Engine Optimisation, AI Overviews and Generative Engine Optimisation — and if you’re wondering whether that’s three things or one thing with three names, you’re not alone. Even the people who coined the terms can’t agree.
AEO is about getting your content picked out as the answer — think featured snippets, voice search, the bit Google pulls out before you’ve even clicked anything.
AIO is exactly the same thing!
GEO is about getting cited when tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity pull together an answer from several sources at once, rather than sending someone to a single page.
Some in the industry insist there are meaningful distinctions. Others suggest it’s marketers doing what marketers do best — naming the same thing differently and arguing about which name is better. Either way, the underlying shift is real: more people are getting answers without ever landing on a website, and content needs to be structured so AI tools can find it, trust it, and use it.
So no, you haven’t missed a memo. The jargon genuinely has multiplied. But strip away the acronyms and it comes down to something familiar — clear, well-structured, genuinely useful content that earns its place, whether it’s a person reading it or a machine summarising it on their behalf.
We’re keeping half an eye on it all, so you don’t have to. Give us a shout if you’d like a hand making sense of it for your own content.
