AEO is the older, wider category GEO grew out of: optimizing for any answer surface, not just generative AI. Featured snippets, voice assistants, and AI summaries all count.
If you’ve been doing SEO for a while, you were probably doing some AEO before the term existed, winning the featured snippet box, structuring content for voice search. The overlap with GEO is real: both reward a clear self-contained answer near the top of the page, explicit question framing, and schema that confirms what a section is actually answering. Where people draw the line: AEO covers every answer surface, generative or not, while GEO is specifically about the LLM-powered ones. In practice, most of the work is the same either way.
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