The search industry’s favourite hobby: renaming SEO

Every few years, the search industry gives old ideas a new name. SEO becomes SXO. Then AEO. Now GEO. The acronyms change, the sales pitches get more sophisticated, and businesses are told that the latest development in search means they need a whole new strategy. This time, the pitch is that Google’s AI Overviews and other generative search experiences have changed the rules.

“SEO isn’t good enough anymore. You need answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO).”

There’s some truth buried in there. AI is changing how people find and consume information online, and that creates new considerations for anyone responsible for a website. But here’s the part the jargon tends to obscure: You probably don’t need to throw out your SEO strategy and start again. Not unless your SEO strategy was suspect in the first place.

AEO and GEO describe useful ways of thinking about content in an AI-driven search environment. But much of what they recommend—clear structure, useful answers, topical expertise, authority, trust and good technical foundations—is stuff Google has been telling us to do for years.

In other words, the search experience is changing. The fundamentals haven’t.

So why are people talking about AEO and GEO?

Because generative AI really does change what happens after someone searches.

Traditional search generally gives you a list of links, perhaps with a featured snippet or other search feature providing a direct answer. Generative search can take a more conversational approach. It may draw information from multiple sources, synthesize it and generate a response tailored to the question.

That’s a meaningful change.

It also creates a new challenge for businesses: how do you make your content useful not only to someone clicking through from a search result, but also to an AI system deciding which information to use or cite? That’s where AEO and GEO come in.

The problem isn’t the concepts themselves. The problem is the way they’re sometimes presented—as though SEO has suddenly become obsolete and a completely new discipline has taken its place. It hasn’t.

AEO is mostly about making good information easy to find

AEO generally about structuring content so that search engines and answer engines can identify useful information and provide it as a direct response to a question.

• That might mean putting a clear definition near the top of a page.
• It might mean answering a customer’s question directly instead of burying the answer beneath 500 words of introductory waffle.
• It might mean using descriptive headings or breaking a complicated process into logical steps.

Sound familiar? It should. That’s what Google and reputable SEO professionals have been preaching for more than a decade. The problem is, “SEO” has become a dirty word in the web design industry, and most SEO services are expensive gimmicks. So, why not continue that trend?

Clear information architecture and good content structure have been SEO best practices for years. They’ve also been good practices for accessibility, mobile usability, featured snippets, voice search and, most importantly, actual human beings trying to find an answer without reading entire websites.

There’s nothing wrong with calling this AEO if the term is useful to you. But don’t mistake a new label for a new discipline. If you’ve been creating clear, well-structured content that answers people’s questions, you’ve already been doing AEO all along.

GEO is more interesting—but it isn’t SEO’s replacement

GEO is the newer and somewhat broader term. It generally refers to improving the chances that your content will be discovered, understood, referenced or “cited” by generative AI systems.

This is where things genuinely get more complicated.

An AI-generated answer doesn’t necessarily correspond to one webpage. A system may consider information from multiple sources, determine which information is relevant, reconcile differences between those sources and then generate a new response. Google describes part of this process as grounding: connecting generated responses to information from sources that can support the answer.

That’s obviously different from simply ranking a webpage at position three. But the existence of a new layer between the search query and the final answer doesn’t mean the foundations underneath it have disappeared.

An AI system still needs to find information. It still needs to understand what that information means. It still needs to determine whether a source is relevant and useful. And if it’s going to cite a website as a source, there needs to be some reason to consider that website credible. Those are not particularly new problems.

So while GEO gives us a useful name for thinking about visibility in generative search, it makes more sense to think of it as SEO extending into a new search environment than as SEO’s successor.

Generative AI changed the presentation layer more than the fundamentals

This distinction matters.

AI has dramatically changed the way search results can be presented. Instead of asking a question and choosing from a page of links, a user can increasingly receive a synthesized response that draws on information from several places.

That’s a huge change to the search experience. And users can be lazy, so the likelihood of them accepting whatever AI Overview provides is very high. But tt doesn’t necessarily represent a huge change to everything required for your website to be discoverable in the first place—if you’ve been doing SEO right from the beginning.

Google still needs to crawl and index web content. It still needs to determine what information is relevant to a query. It still has to contend with quality, spam, authority and trust. And AI systems still need good information to work with. In fact, the rise of generative search may make some traditional SEO principles even more important.

• If an AI system is going to summarize your content, it needs to understand it;
• If it’s going to use your content to answer a question, the information needs to be relevant and useful; and
• If it’s going to cite your business as a source, it needs a reason to trust you.

No amount of acronym-heavy strategy changes those basic requirements.

What Google actually wants you to do

Here’s where the whole AEO/GEO discussion gets a little funny.

Google’s guidance for succeeding in AI-powered search keeps circling back to advice that should sound very familiar to anyone who’s been doing SEO for a while.

• Create useful, reliable, people-first content
• Make it easy for search engines to crawl, index and understand
• Organize information logically
• Demonstrate real expertise and experience
• Build a reputation people can trust

Google doesn’t tell website owners to rewrite every page specifically for Gemini (AI Overview). It doesn’t recommend stuffing pages with strange blocks of text designed to appease language models. And it hasn’t announced some secret set of “AI keywords” that will make a website suddenly appear at the top of a search results page. That’s because there isn’t a magic AI-search formula.

There are, however, good content and SEO fundamentals.

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Structure still matters

This is probably where AEO has the most practical value. A well-structured page makes information easier for everyone to understand—including search engines and AI systems.

• Use meaningful headings — Put important information where people can find it.
• Answer questions directly — Don’t make readers work through three paragraphs of marketing copy to discover the answer to the question they actually came to ask.

You can use lists and tables when they’re genuinely useful. You can include FAQs when your audience actually has frequently asked questions. But you don’t need to turn every page into a collection of bullet points just because someone told you that’s what AI likes. Structure content for comprehension, not for a hypothetical robot.

Expertise still matters

Google’s E-E-A-T framework—Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness—also predates the current AI-search frenzy.

That’s significant because AI systems have an enormous amount of information available to them. Simply repeating the same generic advice that’s already on 10,000 other websites isn’t a particularly compelling reason for an AI system—or a human—to choose your content.

Original insight helps. First-hand experience helps. Accurate information and transparent sourcing help. So does demonstrating that there are knowledgeable humans and a legitimate organization behind the website. Again, none of this is revolutionary GEO strategy. It’s just good content design.

What about all those AI-specific SEO hacks?

This is where I’d be particularly cautious.

Whenever a new search technology appears, an industry grows around explaining how to “optimize” for it. Some of that advice is useful. Most of it is simply speculation dressed up as expertise. You’ll hear recommendations about:

• Creating special content chunks for LLMs
• Restructuring websites specifically for AI crawlers
• Adding exotic schema markup
• Rewriting content in ways that supposedly make it easier for language models to digest
• Deploying files such as llms.txt

Some of these ideas may have legitimate applications in particular contexts. But businesses should be careful about treating every emerging tactic as established best practice.

Take llms.txt, for example. It’s attracted considerable attention, but it isn’t a magic ticket to visibility in Google’s AI search results. Likewise, there’s little value in mangling perfectly good content into awkward, robotic prose simply because somebody claims an LLM will prefer it.

The better question is much simpler: Does this make the content better for the people you’re trying to reach? If it does, great. If it doesn’t, you should have a very good reason for doing it anyway.

The industry loves renaming old ideas

There’s a useful distinction between acknowledging that search is changing and pretending that everything we knew about search has suddenly become irrelevant.

Good SEO has always involved understanding what people are looking for and creating content that satisfies that intent. It has always involved making information accessible to both users and search engines. It has always involved building authority and trust rather than publishing mountains of thin content. And it has always required adapting as search engines change.

• AEO puts a greater emphasis on answerability—making it easy for a system to identify and extract a useful answer.
• GEO puts more emphasis on how content is interpreted, synthesized and potentially cited by generative systems.

Those are useful concepts. They can help content designers, SEO professionals and marketers think more clearly about the new ways people are discovering information. But they’re not a rejection of SEO. They’re extensions of it.

So what should businesses actually do?

If you’re responsible for a company’s website, you probably don’t need to throw out your SEO strategy and launch a shiny new GEO initiative. Start with the fundamentals:

1. Create content that answers real questions from real customers
2. Give it enough depth to be genuinely useful
3. Organize it so people can understand and navigate it easily
4. Make your expertise and experience apparent
5. Support important claims with reliable sources
6. Keep your site technically accessible to search engines
7. Build credibility over time

Then pay attention to how AI is changing the way people discover and consume that information. That’s a strategy. Chasing every new acronym isn’t. Because despite all the excitement around AEO and GEO, the basic principle behind successful search hasn’t changed nearly as much as the terminology suggests:

Create useful, trustworthy content and make it easy for search engines to understand. The search results may look very different five years from now, and I’m willing to bet that advice will still hold up.

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