Named by ChatGPT.

AEO is the practice of making your brand the source AI overviews, Perplexity, You.com, and ChatGPT search cite when people ask them questions. AEO is distinct from SEO because the surface is different (an answer box written by AI, not a list of blue links), the ranking signal is different (structured data and citable claims, not backlinks alone), and the citation model is different (direct attribution to source URLs).

GEO is the practice of making your brand show up inside conversational answers from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other large language models. GEO rewards being present on the web in places LLMs ingest at training time: trade press, podcast transcripts, public repos and the sources Wikipedia relies on, not just optimization on your own site. GEO success is measured by recommendation rate inside LLM answers, not by Google rankings.

SEO ranks pages in a list of blue links. AEO puts your brand inside an answer written by AI, with a citation. SEO is dominated by backlinks and keywords on the page. AEO is dominated by structured data (schema), citable facts, and a clean answer surface: short, definitive, ready to hand off. A site can sit near the top of Google and be invisible to AI overviews if its structure is wrong for AEO.

SEO targets crawlers that index the web every few days. GEO targets LLMs that train on a snapshot of the web. Once an LLM is trained, changes to your site do not influence it until the next training cycle. The signals that move GEO are off site: press coverage, podcast transcripts, GitHub READMEs, public talks. SEO can move in a week; GEO moves in quarters.

If your buyers use Google AI Overviews or Perplexity, you need AEO. If your buyers ask ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for recommendations, you need GEO. Most B2B brands, and most B2C brands with a considered purchase, need both. AdMax runs them as separate workstreams inside the same engagement, with distinct deliverables and distinct metrics.

AEO work on the site itself (schema, FAQ pages, llms.txt) can start to show once Google AI Overviews and Perplexity recrawl the site. The lift shows first on questions where your competitors have not done the structural work.

GEO is measured in quarters, not weeks. LLM training cycles are slow, and recommendations are influenced by the volume and quality of web mentions over time. AdMax plans GEO over several quarters and reports leading indicators (press placements, podcast appearances, activity in public repos) every month.

Yes. The term Generative Engine Optimization comes from a 2024 KDD paper by Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan and Deshpande, which tested content changes across 10,000 queries in 25 domains. Its strongest methods were adding citations, adding quotations from credible sources, and adding statistics: the best of them improved a source's standing by 41% and 28% on Position-Adjusted Word Count and Subjective Impression against an unoptimized baseline. On Perplexity, a live engine, the same methods gained up to 9% and 37% on the two metrics, while classical keyword stuffing performed 10% worse than the baseline. Those figures measure citation share inside a generated answer, not traffic and not revenue.

Yes. The AAAT and the senior strategist run press outreach, podcast booking, pitches for contributed bylines and open source releases as part of the engagement. Work off site is where most marketing agencies stop and most LLMs start ranking.