What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?

SEO aims to rank in the list of results, AEO aims to be the source quoted in a direct answer such as an AI Overview or featured snippet, and GEO aims to have your brand mentioned when generative models like ChatGPT or Perplexity answer questions about your category.

Is SEO dead because of AI Overviews?

No, but informational traffic is shrinking. With 68% of searches ending without a click, the value moves towards commercial queries and towards being cited inside answers. The surviving clicks convert roughly 23% better.

How do I get my website cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity?

Publish self-contained answers near the top of each page, mark pages up with accurate schema, keep your entity data identical everywhere, allow AI crawlers in robots.txt, and earn mentions on third-party sites the models read.

Does schema markup help with AI search?

Yes — it removes guesswork about what a page is and how entities relate. Use Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article and BreadcrumbList tied together with consistent @id references, and only mark up content that is visible on the page.

How long does AEO take to show results?

Technical and schema changes are picked up within weeks. Citation share in generative answers typically shifts over three to six months, since models weight source consensus that takes time to build.

BlogSEO16 Jun 202610 min read

AEO and GEO: How to Get Quoted by AI Search in 2026

The short answer

AEO and GEO are the practice of structuring content so AI answers cite it. In 2026, 68% of Google searches end without a click and AI Overviews reduce click-through by up to 60%, so visibility increasingly means being the source quoted inside the answer — which requires clean entity data, schema markup, and content written as self-contained answers.

Key takeaways

68% of searches now end without a click. Ranking #1 and getting no traffic is a normal outcome, not a bug.
When an AI Overview appears, users click a cited source about 1% of the time — but the surviving clicks convert around 23% better.
Answer engines quote self-contained passages. Write the answer in the first 60 words, then explain.
Schema, consistent entity data and third-party mentions are what make a model confident enough to cite you.

For twenty years SEO had one job: be the blue link people clicked. That job is shrinking. Zero-click searches reached 68% of queries in early 2026, AI Overviews now appear on a large share of results, and when one appears, click-through to the sources below drops by nearly 60%.

So the goal moves. You still want to rank. You now also want to be the source the answer is built from — because a citation inside an AI Overview or a Perplexity answer reaches the person even when nobody clicks anything.

AEO and GEO, defined without the hype

SEO — rank in the list of results. Still worth doing; still where most commercial traffic comes from.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) — be the source that gets quoted in a direct answer: AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice results.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) — be present in what generative models say about your category when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation.

They are not three separate projects. They are three outcomes of the same work, weighted differently.

What answer engines actually reward

1. Self-contained answers near the top

A model extracting an answer wants a passage that stands alone. If understanding your paragraph requires the three paragraphs above it, it will not be lifted. State the answer in 40–60 words directly under the heading that asks the question, then explain underneath for humans. Every post on this blog is built that way, deliberately.

2. Structured data that describes reality

Schema markup — Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList — is how you tell a machine what a page is rather than making it guess. Tie everything to consistent `@id` references so your pages read as one entity instead of a dozen unrelated documents. Mark up only what is visible on the page; describing hidden content is a manual-action risk.

3. Entity consistency

Your business name, address, phone number and description should be identical everywhere — site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories. Models build confidence from agreement across sources. Three different phone numbers across three profiles is three reasons not to cite you.

4. Being mentioned where models read

Generative answers lean on sources that discuss your category: industry publications, comparison articles, forums, Reddit threads, YouTube transcripts. A brand that exists only on its own website has one source vouching for it. This is old-fashioned PR and community presence, doing a new job.

5. Crawlability for AI agents

Decide deliberately whether GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended may crawl you, and put that decision in `robots.txt`. If you want to be quoted, you must be readable — blocking every AI crawler and then wondering why no model mentions you is a common own goal.

What this means for traffic, honestly

Volume will fall in some categories. Informational queries — “what is X”, “how does Y work” — are being answered without a click, and that traffic is not coming back. Commercial queries where someone is choosing a supplier still produce clicks, and the clicks that survive an AI Overview convert around 23% better than before, because the tyre-kickers got their answer upstairs.

The strategic response is to stop measuring SEO by sessions alone and start measuring qualified enquiries and citation share — how often you appear as a source when someone asks a model about your category. Which, inconveniently, means your tracking has to be honest first.

A practical 90-day plan

01Weeks 1–2: technical audit. Core Web Vitals, indexation, canonicals, sitemap, robots. Nothing else matters if the crawl is broken.
02Weeks 3–4: entity work. Schema graph with consistent IDs, Google Business Profile, matching NAP everywhere.
03Weeks 5–8: rewrite the top 10 commercial pages into answer-first structure with FAQ blocks covering the real 'people also ask' set.
04Weeks 9–12: off-site presence — comparison pieces, directories, industry mentions, and answers in the places your buyers already read.
05Ongoing: track citations. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity your category questions monthly and record who gets named.

We do this as one service rather than three — SEO, AEO and GEO together, because the technical foundations are shared. If you want to know where you currently stand, ask for the audit.