SEO professionals have become very familiar with new acronyms.
Now there are two more appearing regularly in conversations about the future of search: GEO and AEO.
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, generally refers to improving a brand's visibility within AI-generated search experiences and large language model responses.
AEO, or Answer Engine Optimisation, focuses on making information easier for search engines and answer-based platforms to understand and surface when responding directly to questions.
With Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and platforms such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and other AI-powered discovery tools changing how people find information, it's understandable that SEO professionals are wondering whether they need an entirely new skill set.
Should you be learning GEO and AEO?
Probably.
But that doesn't mean abandoning SEO.
In many ways, the skills required to succeed in AI search are extensions of the skills good SEO professionals should already have.
First, What Is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimisation is a relatively new term used to describe strategies intended to increase visibility within generative AI experiences.
Instead of focusing entirely on achieving a traditional search ranking, GEO considers whether a brand or its content is referenced, cited or surfaced when an AI system generates an answer.
For example, somebody might ask an AI search platform:
"What are the best accounting software platforms for small businesses?"
The answer could mention several brands and link to supporting sources.
For businesses, appearing within that response could become another form of organic visibility.
GEO therefore looks at questions such as:
- Is our brand being mentioned in AI-generated answers?
- Is our content being used or cited as a source?
- Do AI systems understand what our company specialises in?
- Are authoritative third-party sources discussing our brand?
- Are we providing information that is easy to understand and reference?
The terminology may be new.
Many of the underlying concepts aren't.
What About AEO?
Answer Engine Optimisation has actually existed as an idea for considerably longer.
AEO focuses on helping search and answer platforms understand information well enough to provide direct answers to users.
Think about traditional search features such as:
- Featured snippets
- People Also Ask results
- Knowledge panels
- Voice search responses
- Direct answers
The growth of generative AI has made this concept more relevant.
Users are increasingly comfortable asking complete questions rather than entering short keyword phrases.
Instead of searching:
"best CRM small business"
they might ask:
"What's the best CRM for a small UK business with five employees that doesn't have a dedicated sales team?"
Search is becoming more conversational.
SEO professionals therefore need to think about questions, context and user problems rather than keywords alone.
Is GEO Really Different from SEO?
This is where things become more complicated.
Some people present GEO as an entirely new marketing discipline.
Others argue that it's simply SEO adapted for AI-powered search.
At the moment, the second interpretation is probably more useful for most SEO professionals.
Many of the things that can improve visibility within AI-powered search experiences are already familiar SEO practices.
For example:
- Creating useful content
- Making pages crawlable and indexable
- Demonstrating expertise
- Building brand authority
- Earning relevant mentions
- Structuring information clearly
- Using descriptive internal links
- Providing original information
- Keeping content accurate and current
Google itself has said that the same foundational SEO best practices remain relevant for appearing within its AI search experiences.
There isn't a magical GEO tag you can add to a page.
There isn't a special piece of schema that guarantees inclusion in an AI Overview.
And there isn't currently a reliable checklist that guarantees an LLM will recommend your brand.
That doesn't make GEO irrelevant.
It simply means SEO professionals should be cautious about treating it as a completely separate science.
Why SEO Professionals Should Still Learn About GEO
Even if GEO remains closely connected to traditional SEO, the way people discover information is changing.
That's reason enough to understand it.
Imagine you're responsible for organic visibility for a software company.
Historically, you might track whether the business ranks for:
"best project management software"
But users might increasingly ask an AI platform:
"Which project management software is best for a remote marketing agency with 20 employees?"
Your company could rank well in traditional search and still be absent from that AI-generated answer.
That creates a new question for SEO teams:
Where is our brand visible across the entire search journey?
Understanding GEO helps you start investigating that question.
Search Is Becoming More Conversational
Traditional keyword research often focuses on relatively short search queries.
AI search encourages something different.
People can provide considerably more context.
They can ask follow-up questions.
They can refine recommendations.
They can describe their exact circumstances.
This means SEO professionals may need to think beyond individual keywords and consider complete user journeys.
For example, somebody researching mortgages might move through questions such as:
"What mortgage can I afford?"
"How much deposit do I need?"
"Should I choose a fixed or variable rate?"
"What happens if interest rates fall?"
"Which lenders accept self-employed applicants?"
Rather than creating five disconnected articles targeting five keywords, an SEO professional can think about how the website becomes a genuinely useful resource across that entire journey.
Original Information Could Become More Valuable
AI can summarise information extremely well.
That creates an obvious problem for generic content.
If your article simply repeats information already available across hundreds of websites, why would an AI system need your particular version?
This could increase the value of content containing information that can't easily be found elsewhere.
That might include:
- Original research
- Proprietary data
- Surveys
- Expert commentary
- First-hand experience
- Case studies
- Experiments
- Unique frameworks
- Customer insights
- Industry benchmarks
The future of content SEO may involve publishing fewer articles that simply target keywords and more resources that contribute genuinely new information.
That's useful for traditional SEO too.
Brand Authority Could Become a Bigger Part of SEO
For years, SEO professionals have debated the relationship between brand and organic search.
AI search could make that relationship even more important.
If multiple trusted websites consistently describe a company as an expert in a particular field, that creates signals beyond the company's own website.
This means SEO professionals may increasingly need to work alongside:
- Digital PR teams
- Journalists
- Industry publications
- Subject-matter experts
- Social teams
- Influencers
- Brand marketers
- Community teams
The objective isn't simply to build backlinks.
It's to build a recognisable presence around the topics that matter to the business.
That requires thinking about mentions, not just links.
AEO Makes Clear Writing More Important
One of the simplest lessons from answer-based search is that clarity matters.
If somebody asks:
"What is a canonical tag?"
a page that provides a direct, accurate explanation is easier to understand than one that spends 500 words introducing the history of Google before answering the question.
That doesn't mean every article should become a collection of short answers.
It means good information architecture matters.
Useful content often includes:
- Clear headings
- Direct explanations
- Logical sections
- Relevant examples
- Concise definitions
- Supporting evidence
- Helpful comparisons
Good AEO often looks remarkably similar to good writing.
Structured Data Still Matters — But Don't Overpromise It
Structured data can help search engines understand information on a page.
SEO professionals should therefore continue developing their knowledge of schema and structured information.
But be careful about claims that adding particular schema automatically makes a website "AI optimised".
There is currently no guaranteed schema markup that forces an AI system to cite your website.
Use structured data when it accurately describes the content and follows search engine guidelines.
Don't use it because somebody has promised it will unlock secret AI rankings.
Learn How to Measure AI Visibility
One area where SEO professionals genuinely need new skills is measurement.
Traditional SEO has established metrics.
Rankings.
Clicks.
Impressions.
Organic sessions.
Conversions.
AI visibility is considerably more difficult to measure.
SEO teams are beginning to investigate metrics such as:
- AI citations
- Brand mentions
- Source visibility
- Prompt coverage
- Referral traffic from AI platforms
- AI-assisted conversions
- Visibility across different question types
The challenge is that AI-generated responses can vary depending on the prompt, context, platform and even the individual user.
A brand appearing for one test prompt doesn't necessarily mean it always appears.
SEO professionals should therefore treat AI visibility data carefully.
The tools will improve.
For now, critical interpretation is essential.
Don't Become Obsessed with Prompt Tracking
As GEO tools develop, it's tempting to recreate traditional rank tracking for AI.
You might track hundreds of prompts and monitor whether your brand appears.
That can provide useful information.
But don't mistake it for a complete measurement system.
People don't necessarily use AI platforms in predictable ways.
One person might ask:
"What's the best CRM for freelancers?"
Another might ask:
"I run a small consultancy and need something to manage leads without paying for lots of features. What should I use?"
Both users could have similar intentions while using completely different prompts.
AI search may require SEO professionals to become more comfortable measuring themes and visibility patterns rather than exact query positions.
Technical SEO Still Matters
The rise of GEO doesn't mean technical SEO becomes irrelevant.
Quite the opposite.
Search engines still need to access and understand websites.
You still need to think about:
- Crawling
- Indexation
- Rendering
- Internal linking
- Site architecture
- Canonicalisation
- Page speed
- Mobile usability
- Structured data
Google's guidance around AI search continues to emphasise traditional technical accessibility.
Before worrying about whether your content is "AI optimised", make sure search engines can actually access it.
The fundamentals remain fundamentals.
Learn How AI Systems Find Information
SEO professionals don't need to become AI engineers.
But having a basic understanding of how generative systems retrieve and use information will become increasingly useful.
Learn about concepts such as:
- Large language models
- Retrieval
- Grounding
- Retrieval-augmented generation
- Entities
- Embeddings
- Query fan-out
- Citations
- Knowledge graphs
You don't need to explain the mathematics behind every concept.
The goal is to understand enough to evaluate claims about AI search intelligently.
That will help you distinguish genuine developments from marketing terminology.
Avoid "GEO Hacks"
Whenever a new marketing discipline appears, hacks quickly follow.
You may see claims such as:
"Use this sentence structure to rank in ChatGPT."
"Add this schema and get cited by AI."
"Mention your brand 20 times to improve LLM visibility."
Treat these claims with caution.
AI search systems are complex and constantly changing.
Strategies based on exploiting one perceived pattern may disappear quickly.
A more sustainable approach is to focus on creating information that deserves to be discovered, referenced and recommended.
That's less exciting than a secret GEO trick.
It's also considerably more likely to remain useful.
Should You Add GEO to Your CV?
Potentially — but only if you can explain what you've actually done.
Adding:
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
to your skills section because you've read three LinkedIn posts about it probably won't help much.
But if you've actively:
- Analysed AI search visibility
- Tracked brand citations
- Tested content formats
- Compared AI and traditional search results
- Developed AI search reporting
- Conducted competitor research
- Built strategies around conversational queries
then it's reasonable to discuss that experience.
Employers are likely to value genuine experimentation more than fashionable terminology.
Should You Call Yourself a GEO Specialist?
Probably not after a weekend course.
GEO is still developing.
Best practices are still being tested.
Measurement remains imperfect.
Platforms are changing rapidly.
There may eventually be established GEO roles, teams and career paths.
But for now, becoming an SEO professional who understands AI search may be more valuable than rushing to replace your existing job title.
Build the skill first.
Worry about the title later.
What Should SEO Professionals Learn Now?
You don't need to completely retrain.
Instead, expand your existing SEO knowledge.
Focus on developing skills across areas such as:
Search fundamentals
Keep strengthening technical SEO, content strategy, internal linking, search intent and authority building.
AI search
Understand how AI Overviews, AI search platforms and conversational discovery are changing user behaviour.
GEO
Learn how brands and sources appear within generative answers and experiment with measuring that visibility.
AEO
Become better at structuring useful information around genuine questions and user needs.
Content quality
Develop content containing original information, expertise and evidence rather than producing generic articles at scale.
Brand authority
Understand how PR, mentions, reputation and subject-matter expertise contribute to organic visibility.
Data analysis
Learn how to interpret AI visibility alongside traditional organic performance.
AI literacy
Understand enough about generative AI to evaluate new tools, strategies and claims critically.
You don't need to master everything immediately.
But you should understand where search is moving.
The Bottom Line
Should SEO professionals learn GEO and AEO?
Yes.
But don't treat them as replacements for SEO.
Treat them as an expansion of it.
People are discovering information through more interfaces, asking more complicated questions and receiving more answers without following the traditional search journey.
SEO professionals need to understand that behaviour.
Learn how AI search works.
Experiment with how brands appear.
Understand conversational search.
Create information worth citing.
Strengthen your technical foundations.
And learn how to measure visibility beyond traditional rankings.
But don't abandon everything you already know because somebody announces that "SEO is dead" and replaces it with another acronym.
The platforms are changing.
The terminology is changing.
The fundamental objective isn't.
Help the right people discover useful, trustworthy information from the businesses you represent.
If you can do that across traditional search and emerging AI experiences, your SEO skills may become more valuable, not less.
If you're looking for your next opportunity in SEO, explore the latest roles on SEO Jobs UK.