GEO, AEO and AIO describe the same work. Different people coined them at different moments, and a growing number of agencies now sell them as if they were three disciplines with three price tags. They are not. There is one job, and its parts have been stable long enough that you can check the claim yourself by the end of this page.
This matters commercially rather than academically. Acronym inflation is how a service gets priced three times. If you understand where the terms came from, you can tell a vendor who knows the work from one who has renamed it.
- One job, three names. GEO came from a November 2023 research paper, AEO predates generative assistants and comes from the featured snippet era, and AIO has no origin document and collides with the abbreviation for Google AI Overviews.
- The work is the same list every time: let the crawlers in, state facts plainly, mark up the entity, make third-party sources agree, earn independent mentions, grow reviews on cited platforms, and keep checking what the assistants say.
- The crawler point is the one that catches people out. A firewall or CDN can reject an assistant crawler before robots.txt is ever read, so a site can look perfectly open and still be invisible.
- There is one real distinction, and it is not between the acronyms. Classic search competes for a position on a page of links; assistant visibility competes for inclusion in a sentence. No position ten, the question gets rewritten before it is searched, and you can win without seeing any traffic.
- Acronym inflation is a pricing device. A renamed service is hard to compare against last year price or a competitor quote. Buy the list of tasks, not the letters.
Where each term came from
Generative Engine OptimizationAcademic, Nov 2023 Coined in a research paper by Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, posted to arXiv in November 2023 and later published at KDD 2024. The paper tested how editing a page changes whether a generative engine cites it. It is the only one of the three with a citable definition behind it.
Answer Engine OptimizationIndustry, pre-2023 In use before generative assistants, during the featured snippet and voice assistant era. It meant structuring content so a machine could lift a direct answer out of it. The intent was identical to GEO. Only the machine changed.
AI OptimizationVendor coinage No origin document and no settled definition. It also collides with the common abbreviation for Google's AI Overviews, so two people using it are often discussing different things. Treat it as a marketing label rather than a term of art.
One academic term, one inherited industry term, one label with no paper behind it. Ordered that way, the pattern is easier to see: each new acronym arrived when the interface changed, not when the underlying work changed.
The work itself, which is the same in all three
Whichever acronym a proposal uses, this is the list underneath it. If a quote does not cover most of these, the acronym is doing the work the work should be doing.
- Let the crawlers in. Assistants read the web through named crawlers. If robots.txt blocks them, or a firewall or content delivery network rejects their traffic before robots.txt is ever read, nothing else on this list matters. The second case is the one that catches people out, because the site looks perfectly open when you check it.
- State facts plainly, in sentences. A machine can quote a sentence that says what you do, who you serve and what it costs. It cannot quote an impression. Most of the practical gain here comes from writing that is more direct rather than more clever.
- Mark up the entity. Structured data that says this business exists, here is its name, category, location, and here are its profiles elsewhere. This is the machine-readable version of the same facts, and it removes ambiguity about which business you are.
- Make third-party sources agree with you. Directories, listings and profiles that contradict each other make a business harder to describe confidently. Consistency across sources is doing more work here than any on-page trick.
- Earn mentions in places the assistants read. Being described accurately somewhere independent is worth more than describing yourself well twice.
- Grow reviews on the platforms that get cited. Review platforms sit inside the retrieval pipeline of several assistants, which makes reviews an input to being recommended rather than only social proof for humans.
- Check what the assistants currently say, and keep checking. The same system can describe you confidently and wrongly. There is no correction form. Monitoring is the only way to find out, and once is not enough.
Read that list again and notice what is missing: nothing on it is specific to generative engines as opposed to answer engines, or to ChatGPT as opposed to Perplexity. It is one job. Three acronyms are competing to name it.
The one distinction that does matter
Dismissing all three acronyms as identical to search engine optimisation would be the opposite error, and it is the one skeptics make. Something did change, and it is worth naming precisely.
Classic search optimisation competes for a position on a page of links, and the prize is a click. Assistant visibility competes for inclusion in a sentence, and the prize is being named. Those differ in three ways that change what you do on a Monday morning.
- There is no position ten. A page of results has room for a long tail. A recommendation names two or three businesses. You are in the sentence or you are absent, and absent looks exactly like not existing.
- The question gets rewritten before it is searched. Assistants reformulate what the user typed into their own query, a step OpenAI documents for ChatGPT. You are competing to answer a question you never see, which is why results feel arbitrary and why checking once tells you almost nothing.
- You may win and see no traffic. Being named in an answer someone acts on without clicking is a real outcome that your analytics will not show. This is the part that makes the discipline hard to measure honestly, and it is why any vendor promising you clean attribution deserves a follow-up question.
That is one genuine distinction, between optimising for a list of links and optimising for a sentence. It does not subdivide neatly into three. GEO, AEO and AIO all sit on the same side of it.
Why the acronyms keep multiplying
A new acronym is useful to a seller in a way it is not useful to a buyer. A renamed service is hard to compare against last year's prices, hard to benchmark against a competitor's quote, and easy to position as urgent. If a client already buys search optimisation, an adjacent-sounding acronym is a second line on the invoice rather than a revision to the first.
The pricing tells the story. Published ranges for this work run from roughly $1,500 to $50,000 a month depending on who is asked, which is a spread that a defined service does not produce. It is what happens when a category is new enough that nobody can be embarrassed by their own number.
None of which means the work is fake. The work is real, it is early, and being early is most of the advantage available. It means the naming is a sales artefact, and you should buy the list of tasks rather than the letters.
Four questions for anyone selling you an acronym
- Which assistants are you checking, and how often? A specific list with a cadence is a service. Naming the category is a brochure.
- What will you show me at the end of month one? The honest answer is a record of what the assistants currently say about the business and its competitors, plus the fixes that follow from it. Anyone promising a ranking is describing a mechanism that is not published to exist.
- How is this different from what my search optimisation retainer already covers? Much of the list above overlaps with technical work you may already pay for. If a vendor cannot draw that line, you are about to buy something twice.
- What does it cost, in writing, before a call? A discipline where quotes range across more than an order of magnitude is one where asking early saves the most.
The GEO attribution is to the paper Generative Engine Optimization by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ashwin Kalyan, Karthik Narasimhan and Ameet Deshpande, posted to arXiv as 2311.09735 on 16 November 2023 and subsequently published at KDD 2024. The description of AEO as predating generative assistants, and of AIO as lacking an origin document, is our reading of how the terms have been used rather than a claim sourced to any single publication. The $1,500 to $50,000 per month range for published AI visibility retainers is drawn from our own SERP survey of 24 August 2026 and is a spread across vendors, not an average. The seven-item work list and the three-way distinction between position and sentence are our editorial framing. The $250 a month AI search visibility line and the $2,400 a month Grow retainer are our published prices, listed in full on the pricing page.
What we charge, and where to start
We treat it as one job and price it as one line. AI search visibility is $250 a month inside our Grow retainer, published on the pricing page alongside everything else we charge. That covers the structured data and entity signals machines read, citations in the sources assistants trust, review growth on the platforms they check, llms.txt, and monthly tracking of what the assistants actually say about you.
Before buying anything from anyone, find out where you stand. Checking what ChatGPT says about your business takes about ten minutes and we wrote the method out step by step in can ChatGPT find your business. If you would rather have a person do it, the free AI visibility check puts your business to four assistants and sends you the three fixes that matter most, within one working day, at no cost.
Either way, ignore the letters. Ask what gets done, how often, and what it costs.