Not long ago, finding software meant typing a few words into Google and opening several results to compare them. Today, many buyers ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode one detailed question and get a short list of recommended products. The AI has already done the comparing, so your brand is either on that list or it isn't part of the decision at all.
Traditional SEO (search engine optimization) is about getting people to click on your page in a list of search results. AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO (generative engine optimization) are about getting your brand named inside the answer an AI tool writes, even if the reader never clicks a link.
The goal changes from a click to a mention
SEO helps your page show up near the top of a results list. AEO is about writing your pages so an AI tool can pull out a clear, direct answer from them. GEO is the bigger picture: everything that decides whether an AI tool recommends your brand. The term comes from a 2024 research paper by teams at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI, and IIT Delhi. In everyday work, the two overlap a lot, so many people treat them as one effort.
People are already clicking less. Pew Research found that when Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a regular result on 8% of visits, compared with 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary on only about 1% of visits.
Think of an operations manager at a 40-person architecture firm who wants billing software that works with QuickBooks. Before, they would search a few keywords and open four or five results. Now they ask one full question and read one answer that names four products. If your product is one of those four, you are on the shortlist before anyone visits your website. If it isn't, you were never compared.
One question turns into many searches
An AI tool doesn't usually search for the buyer's exact sentence. It breaks the question into smaller ones, such as "time tracking for architects," "QuickBooks sync," and "pricing for 40 users," and searches for each. Google calls this query fan-out. The result is that your page doesn't have to rank first for the main question to be used in the answer.
Ahrefs studied 15,000 prompts and found that only 12% of the pages AI tools cited ranked in Google's top 10 for the original question. For ChatGPT it was 8%.
Different AI tools also look in different places:
Google's AI features and Gemini use Google's search results.
ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot rely heavily on Bing. Seer Interactive found that 87% of ChatGPT's search citations matched Bing's top results.
Perplexity uses its own search.
Claude draws partly on Brave Search.
So it's worth making sure your site is set up in Bing too, using Bing Webmaster Tools and a feature called IndexNow that tells Bing right away when a page changes.
Make sure AI tools can read your site
AI companies use different bots for different jobs. Some bots collect text to train AI models, and others look up pages to answer questions in real time. Many websites blocked all AI bots to protect their content from training, and by doing so they also stopped showing up in AI answers. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity each have a bot used for search: OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, and PerplexityBot. If you want to appear in their answers, these should not be blocked.
There is a second problem. Many websites load prices and details only after the page opens, using scripts. Google's bot can handle that, but Vercel and MERJ studied billions of AI bot visits and found that none of the major ones can. If your price only appears after a script runs, an AI tool may see a blank space instead. The fix is to put important facts, like prices, plan details, and features, directly into the page text.
Write so each sentence makes sense on its own
AI tools don't read a page from top to bottom like a person. They pick out short pieces that answer a specific question and leave the rest. Research gives a few useful clues:
Put the answer first. Kevin Indig studied 18,012 ChatGPT citations and found that 44% came from the first 30% of the page.
Use real facts instead of repeating keywords. In the Princeton study, adding statistics improved visibility by about 31% and adding quotes by about 41%, while repeating keywords lowered it by about 8%.
Make every key sentence complete. Microsoft advises writing sentences that still make sense when taken out of the page.
Here is a simple example using a made-up product. A weak opening would be: "Our software makes billing simple for teams of all sizes." A stronger one would be: "BeaconTime connects with QuickBooks Online in both directions and costs $12 per user a month." The first tells an AI tool almost nothing. The second names the product, what it does, and the price.
Freshness matters too. Ahrefs found that pages cited by AI tools were about 25.7% newer on average than pages in regular search results. Keep your prices and features up to date, and show when the page was last updated.
What others say about you matters most
In traditional SEO, links from other websites count as votes for your site. AI tools lean more on whether several independent sources talk about your brand in a similar way. In an Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands, mentions of a brand across the web were much more closely tied to AI visibility than links were: 0.664 compared with 0.218.
Most of those mentions come from places other than your own site. In one study of ChatGPT, "best of" list articles made up 43.8% of the pages it cited. Muck Rack found that 84% of the sources AI tools cited in May 2026 were earned news coverage, and only 0.3% were paid or sponsored content.
This explains a common surprise. A product can rank fourth on Google and still never appear in ChatGPT. When you check which sources ChatGPT used, you often find a few "best software" articles that either leave the product out or list old pricing. A link from a random blog won't solve that. Getting your correct details into those specific articles will.
Measuring results is different
In an AI answer there is no "position two." Researchers at SparkToro and Gumshoe asked the same kinds of questions nearly 3,000 times and found it was extremely rare to get the same list of brands twice. But if you repeat a question many times, the share of answers that mention your brand stays fairly steady. If your brand shows up in 15 of 50 answers, your share is 30%, and that is the number to follow over time.
The sources AI tools use also change quickly. Profound found that 40% to 59% of the websites cited for the same questions changed within a month. One quick check by hand can easily give the wrong picture.
Website visits alone also don't tell the whole story. Many people read an AI recommendation and then search for the brand name later. You can still catch some visits by looking for traffic tagged utm_source=chatgpt.com and the AI Assistant channel in Google Analytics 4.
Side by side
Traditional SEO
Goal: A click on your page
How people search: Short typed keywords
What builds trust: Links from other sites
How you measure: Ranking and visits
AEO
Goal: A clear, direct answer taken from your page
How people search: Direct questions
What builds trust: Accurate, well-organized facts
How you measure: Featured answers and citations
GEO
Goal: Your brand named in an AI answer
How people search: Long questions split into smaller searches
What builds trust: Mentions across other websites, videos, and reviews
How you measure: Share of answers and sources cited
SEO still matters
GEO builds on SEO instead of replacing it. AI tools don't answer product questions from memory, because what they learned is months old. They search the web as you ask and read the pages they find. If your site loads slowly, is hard to find on Google or Bing, or has thin pages, the AI may never open it. Regular search also still sends real visitors and is far easier to track than AI mentions.
It's also wise to be careful with big claims. Google's John Mueller said in 2025 that no AI system uses a file called llms.txt, and Ahrefs found that adding extra code tags (schema) to 1,885 pages did not increase AI citations. Many of the numbers in this article show a link between two things, not proof that one causes the other, and many come from companies that sell SEO tools. AI products change fast, so treat these findings as a guide and test them for your own business.
What to do this week
Check that your site settings allow the AI search bots mentioned above.
Open your pricing and product pages and make sure the key facts appear in the page text itself.
Set up your site in Bing Webmaster Tools and turn on IndexNow.
Rewrite the opening of your five most important pages so each key sentence names the product, what it does, and a real number.
Write down 20 questions your buyers ask. Ask each one several times in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google's AI Mode, and note how often your brand appears and which sources are cited.
That is a lot of answers to record, so you may want a tracking tool later. Doing the first round yourself is still worth it, because you will see exactly which articles and websites the AI trusts.
Originally published on Lumirank: Traditional SEO vs GEO and AEO: How Search and AI Answers Differ
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