SEO & AI search
SEO, AEO and GEO: what changes—and what doesn’t?
Understand SEO, answer engine optimization and generative engine optimization—and the practical work that helps B2B content become useful and discoverable.
The short answer
SEO, AEO and GEO emphasize different discovery experiences, but the useful work overlaps: make the business understandable, answer real questions, publish evidence and ensure the right pages can be found and read. The labels do not create a shortcut to traffic.
Three labels. Start with the reader.
Here is how we use the terms. SEO is the work of helping a website become discoverable and useful in search. AEO, or answer engine optimization, emphasizes clear answers to the questions people ask. GEO, or generative engine optimization, emphasizes visibility and representation in AI-generated responses.
These are working descriptions, not three separate technical standards. For a B2B buyer, the practical question is whether they can understand your expertise and find evidence relevant to their decision.
A buyer may want a supplier shortlist, an explanation of a process or help comparing approaches. Build for that question before deciding which acronym to put in the project name.
What Google’s guidance actually says.
Google’s guidance on AI features says its existing SEO practices remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode. Supporting pages must be indexed and eligible for a search snippet. Google does not require special AI files or a new schema type for those features.
That is guidance for Google Search, not a promise about every AI product. It also does not guarantee a citation or a click. It gives a team a more grounded place to start than chasing an undocumented formatting trick.
Give each page a useful job.
| Buyer question | Useful page | What makes it credible |
|---|---|---|
| Can this agency help with my business? | A focused service or industry page | Clear scope and relevant client work |
| How should we approach this problem? | A detailed guide or comparison | A usable framework with specific examples and limits |
| Why should we believe the claim? | A case study or research page | A defined role, method and supported finding |
| What should we do next? | A practical checklist or brief | A next action the reader can actually complete |
This is our planning approach. It avoids making several thin pages for slightly different phrases and gives the content a role beyond attracting a visit.
Google’s people-first content guidance encourages useful, reliable content with a clear purpose and substantive value. A larger publishing calendar is not evidence that those qualities are present.
Make the expertise easy to examine.
Explain who did the work, what the question was and what the evidence supports. In original research, describe the sample and scope. In a case study, separate the agency’s role from the client’s wider business results.
Use a concise answer near the beginning, then provide the detail someone needs to evaluate it. A summary should help the reader enter the subject, not replace the reasoning.
Connect related pages with descriptive links. Google’s link guidance explains why crawlable links and meaningful anchor text matter. For the reader, the same discipline makes the next question easier to follow.
Measure discovery and business value separately.
Google reports activity from its AI Search features within Search Console’s overall Web reporting, according to its AI features documentation. Do not label the whole report “AI traffic.”
Track useful page and query trends, identifiable referral sources and qualified inquiries. Keep a separate record of any manual checks of AI answers, including the prompt, date and context. A sampled mention is an observation, not a reliable count of all exposure.
For a practical next step, use our AI-search readiness checklist. Start with the pages that explain your core expertise and the evidence behind it.