The same work as AEO under a name that emphasises the generated answer rather than the engine: being named and cited when ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or AI Overviews write an answer to a buyer's question. In practice the terms are interchangeable, and the checklist is the same.
The one useful distinction
GEO as a term came from a 2023 research paper that tested which changes to a page made a generative engine more likely to quote it: adding statistics, citing sources, quoting authorities, plainer language. Those are page-level tactics. AEO as used by practitioners includes the off-site work too. This site uses 'AI visibility' for the measurement and describes the work plainly.
What the page-level tactics look like in a real answer
Perplexity's answer to 'best warehousing companies in Jebel Ali' cited six pages. The two companies it named had a services page that stated the zone, the square metres and the licence in the first paragraph; the four it left out had pages that said 'solutions' and 'excellence'. Nothing about the four was wrong. The engine simply had nothing quotable to lift, so it lifted from a directory instead.
That is GEO in one example: a page the engine fetches must contain the sentence that answers the question, with a number in it where a number exists. The report's readiness checks say whether the engine can fetch the page at all; the gap table says which questions it fetched someone else's page for.
The term behind it: AEO
The work of being named and cited in answer engines' answers. Interchangeable in practice with GEO.
The work the report's fixes describe: the thirteen site checks, then the profiles, listings and pages the engines cite. The report ranks five fixes by the questions each would recover. AEO, in full.
Read next
GEO · The generative engine optimisation checklist · The AI visibility glossary
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Your website, region and work email. The score appears in about three minutes, and the report is a link you keep.