Every few months a new acronym appears and someone announces the death of SEO. Let us put things in order, because beneath the noise there is a real change. It is just not the clickbait version.
The three acronyms, one line each
- AEO, Answer Engine Optimization: optimisation for answer engines, from direct answers to voice assistants. The unit is not the page, it is the answer.
- GEO, Generative Engine Optimization: optimisation for generative engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. The goal is to be the source the model chooses to cite.
- AIO, AI Optimization: the umbrella term that often overlaps with GEO.
Three acronyms, one direction: from ranking to citation.
What really changes in the work
Less than the acronyms suggest in technique. Much more in priorities.
1. Entity first, keywords second. A generative engine cites sources it trusts. Trust starts with the entity: who you are, what you can prove you know, which verifiable sources connect to you. Coherent structured data, clean sameAs, a biography that matches everywhere.
2. Citable content beats long content. A model extracts clear claims, not cautious paragraphs. A TL;DR at the top, a precise thesis, concrete examples. If your article can only be summarised by betraying it, it will not be summarised. It will be skipped.
3. Structure matters more than before. Question-shaped headings, a direct answer in the first paragraph, lists and tables where they help. Not to please the algorithm, but to make the content extractable without ambiguity.
4. Measure where you appear, not only where you rank. The new metric is not average position. It is how often you are cited, and in which context, inside generative answers. Tools are coming; in the meantime you can still check manually by asking models real questions.
What does not change
Technical SEO remains hygiene: sitemaps, performance, crawlability, canonical tags. Necessary, never sufficient. Content still has to serve a person, because AI systems are trained on text written for humans, not for algorithms.
The summary I use
SEO is not dying: it is changing audience. I used to optimise for an engine that returned ten links. Today I also optimise for a system that returns an answer and decides whether my name belongs in it. The real work is the same as ever: build a credible entity and say clear things. It simply matters more now.
If you want the broader frame, it is the core of my SEO & AI Search pillar.