Answer engine optimisation is the work of being named and quoted when an AI answers a question. Generative engine optimisation is the same idea applied across generative engines. In practice they overlap almost completely.
Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, is the work of becoming the business an AI names and quotes when someone asks a question. Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, describes the same work across generative engines such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity.
The terms came from different places. The work is the same.
AEO came out of the older idea of optimising for Google's answer boxes and voice assistants, where you got one answer instead of a list. GEO arrived with tools like ChatGPT, and was coined in academic research on how those tools choose their sources.
Neither term won. Buyers use both, agencies use both, and some now add a third, LLM SEO.
Only in emphasis. AEO tends to be used when the focus is a direct answer to a specific question. GEO tends to be used when the focus is showing up across AI generated content more broadly.
If an agency tells you these need two separate jobs, ask them to name one task that appears in one and not the other.
The useful difference is not AEO against GEO. It is whether an AI is answering from memory or after a search, because those two give almost completely different lists of businesses.
Across thousands of questions we put to AI in 2026, the two answers named the same New Zealand business about one time in eight. That gap is real, it is measurable, and it changes what you should actually do.
No. SEO gets a page into a list that a person then picks from. GEO and AEO make a business the one name inside a single answer, where there is no list and no second place. A lot of the groundwork is the same. What you are aiming at is not.
Whichever your audience uses. We use both, because buyers search for both.
No. If a task appears in one and not the other, ask what it is. In our experience the answer is that there is not one.
We will run your market's questions and show you the result. Phone 027 368 0892 or email rob@citable.co.nz.