# What is AI SEO, and is it the same as GEO?

**They are three names for roughly the same work.** AI SEO, GEO (generative engine optimisation) and AEO (answer engine optimisation) all describe making a website eligible to be used and quoted in an AI answer. None is an official term and no search engine uses any of them. Most of what they cover is ordinary technical SEO plus writing that answers a question directly. Blue Crane Works, in Hamilton, Ontario, will tell you which part is which.

## What does GEO stand for?

Generative engine optimisation. Be careful searching for it, because "GEO" in marketing has meant
geographic targeting for twenty years, and the two meanings now collide in the same results. If an
article about GEO is talking about service areas and location pages, it is the old meaning.

You will also see AEO, answer engine optimisation, and simply "AI SEO". Treat all three as the same
subject. They were coined by marketers, not by Google, Microsoft or OpenAI, and you will not find any of
them in a search engine's own documentation.

## Is AI SEO different from normal SEO?

Mostly no, and the engines say so themselves, which is the part the sales pitches leave out. Google
states in writing that there are [no additional requirements](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) to appear in AI
Overviews or AI Mode beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and that "you don't need to create
new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup" to get there. It also says there is "no special
schema.org structured data that you need to add."

So the foundation is the same foundation: the site loads, the crawler can reach it, the words are in
the HTML, the pages are organised, nothing is accidentally hidden. If that is not true, no amount of AI
optimisation does anything, because there is nothing to optimise.

## What is actually new, and what is a rebrand?

| The work | New or renamed? | Why |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Letting the AI crawlers in | Genuinely new | OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot did not exist. Each is a separate decision and blocking one does not block the others. |
| Allowing crawler IPs at the CDN | Genuinely new | OpenAI names it as an eligibility requirement and publishes the ranges. No ranking tool reports it. |
| Answer-first writing | Renamed | Putting the answer in the first paragraph was good writing before assistants existed. It matters more now because a model lifts a paragraph. |
| Question-shaped headings | Renamed | This was keyword research with better manners. Still worth doing. |
| Watching noarchive and nosnippet | Newly consequential | The tags are old. What is new is that they now remove a page from AI answers while every ranking tool stays green. |
| llms.txt and AI markup files | Neither, mostly | Google says outright you do not need them. They make a site cheaper to read; they do not make it rank. |
| Measuring citations | Genuinely new, and free | Microsoft Clarity reports which pages were cited in AI answers and the queries that retrieved them. |

Sources: [Google, AI features and your website](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features);
[OpenAI, Bots and crawlers](https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots);
[OpenAI, Searching the web with ChatGPT](https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9237897-chatgpt-search);
[Bing Webmaster Guidelines](https://www.bing.com/webmasters/help/webmaster-guidelines-30fba23a);
[Microsoft Clarity, AI citations](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/ai-visibility/ai-citations-overview).

## Is SEO dead?

No, and the question is usually asked by someone who read that AI summaries reduce clicks. That part is
real: Pew found that [users click a link far less often](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/) when an AI summary
appears. But the work that makes a page eligible to be summarised is the same work that made it rank,
and a page nobody can crawl gets neither.

What is genuinely different is the shape of the prize. You are no longer only trying to be a blue link
someone clicks; you are also trying to be the source a machine quotes. Those overlap heavily, and where
they differ, the difference is mostly about answering one question completely on one page.

## Do I need to buy an AI SEO service?

Not necessarily, and we would rather say that than sell you something you can do yourself. The
crawler checks in this article take an afternoon if you are comfortable with a text file and a terminal,
and our [free check](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/ai-visibility.html#free-check) runs the technical half in ten seconds without you
buying anything.

What is worth paying for is the part that takes time rather than knowledge: writing real answers to
real questions, one page at a time, and keeping the technical floor from drifting back. That is what our
[AI Visibility Pass](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/ai-visibility.html) and [managed websites](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/websites.html) do.

## What nobody can guarantee

A citation, a ranking, or visibility in an AI answer. Bing puts it in its own guidelines: "SEO does
not guarantee rankings or traffic, and GEO does not guarantee grounding or citations in AI experiences."
Any service promising you a spot in ChatGPT's answers is promising something the vendors explicitly say
cannot be promised. We guarantee the work and the proof, and we say this out loud because the number of
people willing to is a useful filter.

## Want this checked and fixed on your site?

The AI Visibility Pass runs every check in this article against your live site, fixes what it
finds, and hands you the proof. Fixed quote, written guarantee. On a managed website it is included
from launch.

[See the AI Visibility Pass](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/ai-visibility.html)
[Managed websites, $100 a month](https://bluecraneworks.ca/solutions/websites.html)

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Source: https://bluecraneworks.ca/articles/what-is-ai-seo-and-geo