Acceptance of Circumstances, AEO, AI Search, Being Found On Bing, Being Found on Google, marketing best practices, organic SEO, pull marketing, Quora, Reddit, SEO, Understanding Your Environment

The Two Main Branches Of The Being-Found-Online Tree: SEO and AEO

June 2025 Update To Our Original Blog Post Below: As digital marketers and SEO experts scramble to learn and express all the changes happening in the “being found online” world because of AI, I’m seeing yet another acronym being used related to being found in content served up in AI search/chat/answer engines, and that is GEO.

What Is GEO And How Is It Different From SEO?

According to Google AI Overviews, “SEO (Search Engine Optimization) focuses on optimizing website content for traditional search engines like Google to improve rankings and visibility in search results. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), on the other hand, focuses on optimizing content for AI-powered search engines and generative AI models like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. While both share the goal of increasing online visibility, their strategies and target search engines differ.”

For now, I think it’s safe to say that people are using the acronyms GEO and AEO pretty interchangeably. Read on to learn about AEO!

Original Blog Post:

Every since I learned that Google rolled out Google AI Mode to all of U.S. users of its search tool in late May 2025, I’ve been educating myself as much as possible about the impact. In fact, I just posted the following on LinkedIn:

“This is how I’m looking at the challenge to optimize your organization’s chances of being found online these days. I’m changing my tune a bit. I didn’t think it was so critical a few months back for organizations to optimize for #AIsearchengines #chatbotengines #chatengines #answerengines, or however else you want to refer to search tools that employ #GenerativeAI capabilities, but with the very recent introduction of #GoogleAIMode, I’m seeing more need and urgency to cater to both the aforementioned type of search engines and to #traditionalsearchengines, like your standard Google and Bing search engines. #seo #searchengineoptimization #beingfoundonline #aeo #answerengineoptimization.”

As indicated in our LinkedIn post (shown above), just a few months ago, we didn’t think we needed to be so concerned about how AI search engines might impact how an organization was found online. Why? Because we didn’t think a large enough percentage of “searchers” were using AI search engines (check out this glossary for the definition of AI search engines, and the numerous terms used for AI search engines). But given Google longstanding dominance in the search-engine landscape, we’re pretty sure searchers are going to start switching from the traditional Google search tool to the AI Mode tool, and all marketers and organizations have to be ready for it.

But, while we need to be ready for greater use of AI search engines by searchers, we can’t lose site that many individuals will continue to search using the former, traditional forms of search engines offered by Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc. Hence the reason for our image below.

What Is The Overlap Between AEO and SEO?

So, where is the overlap between optimizing your online presence so that information and data you share appears in generative AI results (AEO), but also appears in traditional search results (SEO)?

We plan to write a much more detailed blog post about that, but for now we’ll simply say that the commonality between AEO and SEO is producing and sharing content that answers questions that your target audiences have, whether those questions be about:

  • The broader category/nature of products and services you offer vs. your organization’s specific products and services
  • The specific products and services your organization offers
  • Your organization
  • Challenges or issues that your target audiences have that are tangential (not directly related to your organization and your products and services) but very important to your clients.

And, whether they are answered via ongoing, fresh website blog posts or regularly updated Q & As housed in a website FAQ like ours, or via social media posts or discussion forums like Quora and Reddit, it’s critical to both AEO and SEO that the questions you answer are helpful to your target audiences and not too self-serving!

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