GEO vs AEO vs SEO
Short answer: SEO tries to rank your link in a list of results. AEO tries to make your page the one short answer a search engine extracts. GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — tries to make an AI assistant name your business when someone asks it for a recommendation. They share some groundwork, but they are optimized for three different moments and measured in three different ways.
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it optimizes for | A ranked position in a list of blue links | The single extracted answer — featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants | Being named and recommended inside a generated AI answer |
| Where the result appears | Google / Bing results pages | Position zero, knowledge panels, voice replies | ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, Meta AI conversations |
| What the user does next | Clicks through to your site | Often reads the answer and stops | Asks a follow-up, then contacts whichever brand the model named |
| What wins | Backlinks, crawlability, keyword coverage, page speed | Clean question-and-answer structure, schema markup, concise direct answers | Cited statistics, named experts, quotable passages, information gain, third-party mentions |
| What does not work | Thin duplicate content | Burying the answer 800 words down the page | Keyword stuffing — measured at roughly 10% worse than doing nothing (KDD 2024) |
| How success is measured | Rankings, organic sessions, click-through rate | Snippet ownership, zero-click impressions | How often each engine names you, and in what terms, when asked a buying question |
Do you still need SEO?
Yes. Generative engines still have to be able to fetch and read your pages, and several of them lean on conventional web indexes when they retrieve sources. Good technical SEO — a crawlable site, sensible titles, working canonicals, fast pages — is the floor. GEO is what you build on top of that floor. What does not carry over is the tactical layer: the same KDD 2024 study that measured a 40% lift from statistics and citations measured keyword stuffing at about −10% versus making no changes at all.
Where AEO fits
AEO is the discipline of being the extracted answer — the snippet, the People Also Ask box, the reply a voice assistant reads aloud. It rewards tight question-and-answer structure and clean schema markup, and much of that structure also helps a generative engine locate a quotable passage. MyFast.ai runs a dedicated Answer Engine Optimization service at aeo.myfast.ai; this site is the GEO service.
Why GEO is a different job
A generative engine does not hand back a ranked list. It reads several sources and writes one answer, and the brands it names are the ones whose content gave it something concrete to repeat: a hard number, a named expert saying something specific, a claim with a source attached. That is why GEO work looks less like keyword planning and more like publishing evidence — and why it is also seeded off your own site, in the forums and communities models read when they decide whether a brand is trusted.
See the numbers behind this
Every statistic we cite is listed with its source, including the caveats.