AEO 101 | Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) vs SEO vs GEO Explained

Sheridan Wendt (00:00)
So, the question is, is SEO dead?

Personally, I think...

They're synergistic, SEO and AEO. They go together like wine and cheese, know, pizza and pepperoni.

Welcome to the Answer Engines podcast. I'm your host Sheridan Wendt and I'm here with my long time friend Jon Foster and we're going to be talking about what is AEO, Answer Engine Optimization, the new thing, right? John, what do you know about AEO?

Jonathan Foster (00:29)
Not much, not, is it like Google?

Sheridan Wendt (00:31)
Not much. It's a new thing.

I mean, no. Google Gemini. ⁓ Yeah, the new thing, right?

Jonathan Foster (00:35)
No. ⁓ okay. Okay. So like new Google, Google 2.0.

Sheridan Wendt (00:43)
So, the question is, is SEO dead? Some people disagree, right? Some people think it is, some people think it's not, some people think, you know, it's still important. Personally, I think...

They're synergistic, SEO and AEO. They go together like wine and cheese, know, pizza and pepperoni.

All right, so on this episode, there's going to be a lot of technical jargon, right? It's going to be a lot of technical stuff. I'm really going to try to not get too in-depth in the weeds with the tech stuff. But to help me out, I'm going to be referencing aeoauthority.org, the authority on answer engine optimization. So let's start just with a basic definition.

of what is AEO. You probably have heard of SEO, search engine optimization. That is how you optimize your website, your content to rank well in a search engine, right? Search engine optimization. So you want to rank very high in Google. You want when somebody searches Tony's pizza, you want your Tony's pizza to be the one that pops all the way to the top of the list and rank number one. So you deploy search engine optimization strategies.

optimizing your content to appear high in that search engine. The next one, answer engine optimization, is the practice of optimizing your brand, your entity, on all digital platforms in a way that gives AI confidence about your brand. I'm going to read straight from aeoauthority.org. Here we go.

Answer engine optimization is the practice of structuring and optimizing digital content so that large language models and answer engines can accurately retrieve, understand, and cite it when generating responses to user queries. Unlike SEO, which focuses on ranking pages and search results, AEO ensures that your content is surfaced directly within

AI-generated answers. We're talking about chat, GBT, Gemini, perplexity, Claude, right, or other platforms.

Jonathan Foster (02:52)
Okay, so what would in your own words like be the difference between how you're ranked in SEO versus how you're ranked in AEO you?

Sheridan Wendt (03:03)
Well, for starters, with SEO, you can pay for ads and get ranked at the very top, right? Or not get ranked, but get placed at the very top of the search results. The other thing is, what it's really doing in SEO is it's looking at a given set of keywords and trying to make the best guess ranking of which sites are the most relevant to the keywords that you put into the search, right?

Jonathan Foster (03:08)
Mmm.

Mm.

Sheridan Wendt (03:25)
But then you still got to go and look at maybe the top five to 10 of those links to find out the answers to the question that you're really trying to answer. So the difference being that with an answer engine with an LLM, it's just going to give you the answer.

Jonathan Foster (03:39)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, so you're cutting out, you know the whole entire method of you just searching and going through 15 websites and Just get the information got it. All right

Sheridan Wendt (03:49)
Exactly, Right. And AEO is just the practice of structuring your data, optimizing all your entire digital identity online so that these answer engines, these LLMs are mentioning you, talking about you, citing you, referring you, right, in these conversations that they're having with their users.

Jonathan Foster (04:11)
Okay, so kind of like visibility, you know, gotcha.

Sheridan Wendt (04:14)
Yeah, yeah, so.

So then, now that we kind of know like what AEO is, I think the next thing is why does it matter, right? In 2026 and 2027 and beyond, why does AEO matter? and that's because the more that time goes on, the more we're seeing people stop using search engines and just start using AI almost exclusively when they're doing

searches, they're researching, when they want to know something, when they want to learn something, when they want to compare two products, when they want to find a new product, when they want to find a new service, people are just using search engines less and less, and they're using AI more and more. And that's why answer engine optimization is going to be more and more important over time. And it's never been more important than it is right now.

Jonathan Foster (05:02)
Yeah, what I've noticed when I use my voice commands, because you know, I mean, if I don't know something or even if I'm not sure, I like to do like a voice like, how do you make a bird house? You know, something random, you know? Now, mind you, I know it has four walls and a hole and a, you know, a place for the bird to perch, you know what I mean? But that doesn't give me 100 % information. You know, could I make something for that? You know, I mean, what birds are?

Sheridan Wendt (05:22)
you

Jonathan Foster (05:30)
native to my local area. What size hole diameter do I need? know what mean? Things like that where I need a little bit more information and it normally pops up because I have a Samsung phone and I have a widget for Google and it comes up with Gemini AI and then it just tells me it. I don't even have to like keep holding my phone. I can set it down and continue what I'm doing and it just you know lets me know. So yeah I think we're using

EAO a lot more than we actually realize right now.

Sheridan Wendt (06:04)
AEO, but yes. And I think in that case, depending on how you search it, if you searched in Gemini or if you actually searched in like a Google search, it could either be AEO, answer engine optimization, or it could be GEO, generative engine optimization. And we're going to talk about the differences between those here in a little bit.

Jonathan Foster (06:05)
Ayo.

Mm-hmm.

Sheridan Wendt (06:23)
So before we move on, here are four reasons why AEO is so important and it's just gonna get even more important. It's never been more important in history than it has right now today and it's gonna get more important. Number one is zero click dominance. People are just, like you said, not using Google. They're not searching, even if they are using Google. They're not actually clicking on individual websites.

to go and get this information, right? Zero clicks. They're just asking and they're getting an answer. Simple as that. They're not having to click anywhere. The next thing is entity first retrieval, right? LLMs are prioritizing entity recognition and what we call semantic triplets over keyword density. And I don't wanna like get into all the technical stuff, but you can find it on aeoauthority.org.

Jonathan Foster (06:47)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Yeah, I didn't understand any of that.

Sheridan Wendt (07:14)
next point I want to make, context over keywords, right? The content must be contextually rich and answer ready, right? So when we say contextually ready, answer ready, what we mean is if somebody's searching for Tony's Pizza near me, what is the context? Where is near me?

Jonathan Foster (07:17)
Mm.

Sheridan Wendt (07:33)
Is there an answer that's ready to be presented for that? Or what is the number one Tony's pizza in Brooklyn? The context is in Brooklyn and number one. And then answer ready is, is there somewhere on the internet a website, a page, content, anywhere that says we are the number one Tony's pizza in Brooklyn? So that's what we're talking about when we say context over keywords.

And the last point I want to make is multi-platform reach. Right? AEO is visibility across, chat GBT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, all of these other platforms. Right? We're not talking about just one platform like you might with Google, how Google is dominating search today. So that is why AEO is so important right now. And it's going to be even more important as we move forward.

Jonathan Foster (08:24)
So asking the right, having the right answers for the right questions.

Sheridan Wendt (08:28)
Exactly. Exactly.

All right. That sounds like a great time to take a break and hear a message from our friends and sponsors. And we'll be right back after this.

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Sheridan Wendt (09:45)
And we're back and we are here today talking about answer engine optimization. What is it? Why is it important? How does it work? All right, let's dive back in.

In a minute, we're going to dive more into AEO and how it works and how to implement it. But the first thing we need to understand is how is it different? How does AI search work? How is that different than doing a Google search? Why can't we just do SEO and that will make us fine for AEO? Well, here's the reason.

And I'm going to read this straight off of aeoauthority.org.

Unlike traditional search engines that match keywords and rank pages, AI search relies on retrieval, augmented generation, and vector embeddings, and semantic similarity. And then there's a guide here for anybody who's super nerdy and wants to understand what rag is and what vector embeddings are, there's a guide right there in the glossary on aeoauthority.org. But essentially, it works a little different.

and it's not the same as Google. That is the key takeaway here.

It's not the same as a search engine, like Google, Bing, are there even any other search engines? Yeah, there are. It's not the same as a

Jonathan Foster (11:01)
Duck Duck Go. Is

Ask Jeeves still a thing?

Sheridan Wendt (11:05)
Ask Jeeves, ⁓ my gosh. Wow, man, I used to ask Jeeves all the time.

Jonathan Foster (11:07)
That's old

or Yahoo!

Sheridan Wendt (11:13)
I think it's Bing. Is Yahoo Bing? No, that's Microsoft.

Jonathan Foster (11:15)
No, no,

no, no, they're still Yahoo search. yeah, antivirus, you know, naturally install it now.

Sheridan Wendt (11:19)
my god.

Jonathan Foster (11:25)
Just like when you try to, even after you delete the antivirus, they're like, yep, it's in your root kit now, have fun. Ultimately, that's what it feels like. It's invasive, yeah. You gotta dig that out like surgery.

Sheridan Wendt (11:34)
Ha

Yeah. Invasive.

the

So we talked about how AI search is different from a normal traditional search like Google, Bing, Yahoo, even Ask Jeeves, right? And the difference with AI, how do you get more visibility? Because you don't rank in AI, right? You don't rank in an AI search, but visibility, that's something that everybody should be racing for right now.

Some people are, right? Smart companies are trying to get ahead of this and ride the wave, as more people start to adopt AI and use that in their daily lives. So how do you get more visibility in these platforms using AEO? I'm gonna go straight down the list. We've got 10 ways here, right? 10 core factors for getting more visibility. That's entity recognition and semantic clarity, contextual relevance,

and semantic triplets. EAT, right, E-E-A-T, which is experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Number four is retrieval compatibility and embedding quality. Number five, I'm gonna read directly off of here, answer directness and citation formatting. Number six, semantic density and information completeness. Number seven, structured data and schema markup.

Number eight, source authority and domain trust. Number nine, content freshness and temporal relevance. When we say freshness, like how long ago did you post this content? know, is it five years ago? Maybe it's not even relevant anymore, right? And then number 10, crawlability and indexability. So those are terms related to search engines and you might wonder, aren't we talking about AEO? Like I said before, synergistic, right? SEO and AEO.

Jonathan Foster (13:20)
Mm-hmm.

Sheridan Wendt (13:35)
work together beautifully, if you do it right.

Alright, now that was a ton of random vocabulary words. We're not gonna dive into those, but John, anything you wanna say before we move on? Because we're gonna just pretend we didn't just go down into the matrix just now.

Jonathan Foster (13:50)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's not really much. No, but it's pretty, to me it makes sense, you know what mean? Like, you know, a paper that was written on, you know, the difference between XP and Vista, you know, isn't really relevant anymore. know, nobody's using those. So no one's like raising their hand to be like, hey, I want to use Vista.

Sheridan Wendt (14:07)
For sure.

Right, right, right. Okay, so while we're here, now that we understand a little bit more about what is AEO, what is AI search, how is AI search different, I want to clarify a few more things, right? AEO versus SEO versus GEO, right? What is the difference? SEO, search engine optimization, like we talked about, answer engine optimization for AEO, and GEO is generative engine optimization.

So we've got a comparison table here of SEO versus AEO versus GEO. I'm going to go through this and kind of highlight what some of the differences are. ⁓ Looking at in the categories that we're looking at is what are the target platforms? What's the primary goal? What's the user behavior? What's the key metric? And what's the scope, right? So looking at target platforms first, SEO we're talking about Google, Bing, traditional search.

GEO, very similar. We're talking about Google, but with the AI overviews, right? You're searching with Google, and it's generating an AI overview using the search results. Also, search generative experience. Really the same thing. if you go to Google, you go to, I want to say DuckDuckGo probably has a generative experience now. So, that is GEO.

Jonathan Foster (15:21)
Hmm.

Sheridan Wendt (15:28)
And then AEO is you're not using a search engine at all. You're actually using an LLM like Chad GPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude. These are LLMs that are providing you answers, so answer engine optimization. Next thing is the primary goal. With SEO, your goal is to rank in the top 10 of the search results. With GEO, your goal is to appear in the AI-generated summaries.

Jonathan Foster (15:49)
Mm-hmm.

Sheridan Wendt (15:55)
in the search engine that you're using. With AEO, the goal is to get cited and get referenced and even recommended by the LLM itself. ⁓ So that's what we're trying to do with AEO. ⁓ When we're talking about user behavior, on SEO, you want the user to click through to the website. With GEO, you just want the user to read the AI summary and maybe they'll click through to the website. With AEO,

Jonathan Foster (16:05)
Hmm.

Sheridan Wendt (16:24)
you just want them to consume the answer, right? You just want them to say, here's the answer, perfect. They almost never click through to the citation on the website. Some key metrics for SEO, you're looking for organic traffic and you're looking for rankings. For GEO, you're looking for visibility and AI overviews and impressions. And then with AEO, you're looking for citations.

and attribution. How many times is it citing you or your content? And then when we're talking about the scope of these things, SEO is platform specific. Google or Bing or DuckDuckGo or Ask Jeeves ⁓ With GEO, right now, I really think it's Google only. Some of these other engines are starting to roll out their own generative search experience. ⁓

Jonathan Foster (17:03)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Sheridan Wendt (17:16)
I want to say I've seen it on DuckDuckGo. Do you know if they have it?

Jonathan Foster (17:21)
I don't use DuckDuckGo, I'm a... I know I should as a security guy, as confidentiality and stuff like that, it's just so... it's so much easier just to use Google. And, you know...

Sheridan Wendt (17:23)
You don't use DuckDuckGo?

I thought you were a cyber guy, man.

⁓

I heard actually that DuckDuckGo has been compromised. that somebody bought them and now they're really not as independent as they would have you, like they're branded to be.

Jonathan Foster (17:40)
Yeah, it has, yeah.

Yeah, it's it's and that's the thing is it's don't trust everything you read on the internet kids You know kind of deal if you're gonna do anything and also there's nothing I really have to be confidential on searching anyways You know, it's normally how to fix problems as long as I get the answer for that. I'm good

Sheridan Wendt (17:51)
Yeah

So that's why you keep getting ads for new plungers.

I'm just not happy about that.

Jonathan Foster (18:10)
I think

everybody knows how to use a plunger. And if you don't, you what mean? You found out the hard way.

Sheridan Wendt (18:16)
you

I don't even want to go there. don't even want to go there. So the last thing in this chart is what is the scope for AEO and its LLMs? We talked about that. Chad GPT, perplexity, Gemini, Claude. Insert your favorite LLM here. So that's the scope for that.

Jonathan Foster (18:17)
It's... I don't know.

Sheridan Wendt (18:34)
So that is the difference between AEO and SEO and GEO.

so now I just want to introduce a new concept, a new topic before we will dive into it on the next episode.

All right, this is the AIF, the AI Indexability Framework. Now this framework covers how to implement AEO strategies, right? AEO is the practice of implementing strategies to influence answer engines.

The AIF is what to do to actually influence these answer engines, right? So if you want to be implementing AEO, this is what you got to know. We're going to dive into the AI indexability framework on the next episode. So in the meantime, I've had a lot of fun. John, hopefully you learned some stuff. Any questions before we wrap up?

Jonathan Foster (19:20)
Hmm. So the, the GEO is predominantly Google right now, but do you think that other other search engines are going to be starting to adopting that too?

Sheridan Wendt (19:31)
Yeah, I don't know why we call it generative engine optimization. It should just be Google Engine Optimization, right? No, I think other search engines are probably scrambling right now to get their own generative responses at the top of their search. If I was working at Yahoo or Bing or DuckDuckGo, if I was working there, I'd be saying, why are we not doing this?

Jonathan Foster (19:36)
Yeah, right. They should have like a trademark on that.

Yeah.

Sheridan Wendt (19:58)
We need to get it done ASAP, like right now, top priority.

Jonathan Foster (20:01)
So yeah, kind of from what you've went over, my understanding is the SEO is how it used to be in Google, right? Where you would just do, you would put in your search bar and it would pop out some websites, you know what mean? That you can click on, check out, no, this isn't what I wanted, you know what mean? And keep doing that. And then the generative one is where it just textually informs you the answer.

that you wanted to find out. Now the AI one, I think is where when I use a voice command, the AI kicks in, The ⁓ AEO, right? And then it verbally tells me. So I think Google's utilizing like all three at the moment. Would you say that?

Sheridan Wendt (20:52)
Yeah, I would say that GEO on Google right now probably is, that's probably a good way to put it, right? GEO is kind of using a combination of SEO and AEO to generate that answer at the top.

Jonathan Foster (21:03)
Mm.

Gotcha. So Google's not utilizing AEO at the current moment.

Sheridan Wendt (21:11)
Gemini, let's say you go to Gemini.Google.com and you're just talking to Gemini, then yes, that would be AEO.

Jonathan Foster (21:13)
Okay.

Well, they have Gemini, so in the search bar, right? On phones. And you have a Samsung or like, you know, even a Google phone. It's integrated in already.

Sheridan Wendt (21:24)
Well, that's why your, I

know, yeah, it using both? Yes, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Jonathan Foster (21:29)
Yeah. Gotcha. Okay. Cool.

Sheridan Wendt (21:33)
So that sounds like a pretty good spot to wrap up. Next time, we're going to dive into the AI indexability framework, and we're going to take a look at the five phases, which is the what to do and how to implement an effective AEO strategy. We'll catch you next time on the next episode. John, appreciate you for hanging out. Catch y'all later.

Jonathan Foster (21:51)
See ya.