Beyond search, with AEO, GEO & AIEO: Why SEO alone is no longer enough

SEO, or search engine optimisation, has been the foundation of search visibility for over two decades, providing the structural basis for “discovery” for netizens. SEO focuses on improving a website’s organic ranking through keyword targeting, technical structure, backlinks, and content relevance. In recent years, SEO has required deeper integration with structured data and E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) to help search engines index, interpret, and prioritise pages in results.

 

But today we are headed into a zero-click era; gone are the days of keyword usage, backlinking, and siloed SEO. To stay visible, brands have no choice but to optimise beyond Google’s organic results and win across four interconnected layers — SEO, AEO, GEO, and AIEO.

 

AEO (answer engine optimisation) is designed for visibility in featured snippets, “People Also Ask” boxes, voice search, and knowledge panels. Success in AEO depends on clear, concise, and well-structured content, especially FAQ-style answers, step-by-step guides, and schema markup (FAQ Page, How To ...). The goal is to be the source that powers the answer, even if the user never clicks.

 

GEO (generative engine optimisation) is about becoming a trusted citation source for generative AI like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and the like. These models retrieve links and synthesise information from authoritative content. To win in GEO, the content should be citation-ready: Actual, well-sourced, recently updated, and backed by real expertise. This includes publication dates, author credentials, and references to increase the chances of being cited.

 

AIEO (artificial intelligence engine optimisation) focuses on visibility within AI-powered search experiences, such as Google’s AI Overviews and Bing with Copilot. Unlike traditional SEO, AIEO rewards freshness, clarity, and machine-readability. Content needs to be optimised for AI digestion, using structured headings, schema markup, and neutral and factual language. The goal is to be included in AI-generated summaries, instead of ranking below them.

 

All the three acronyms — AEO, GEO, and AIEO represent how all brands — whether one is a publisher, a marketer, or an e-commerce site — ensure that AI crawlers can easily understand enough information about a brand in order to surface it in the synthesised answers they curate within their answer engines. Which leads one into yet another new construct — Generative Search Optimisation (GSO) — which is really more about understanding what is happening within an AI result, the response that’s been generated from a prompt, how a brand is represented there, whether or not it’s linking back, whether or not it’s citing the content or the brand correctly, and whether the information is accurate.

 

It is important not to treat these as competing models. Instead, there is a need to integrate all four — SEO, AEO, GEO, and AIEO — to ensure that content is discoverable, answerable, citable, and AI-ready, across every surface where users now find information. Optimising for search visibility therefore requires a hybrid approach, combining all four to achieve the best results.

 

So what do you need to do? Best to start with an introduction followed by an executive summary for AI and GEO digestion. And then a structured Q&A, clear headings and schema for AEO and voice search. Close with a comprehensive, well-researched analysis for SEO and topical authority. To solidify the trust layer, add author bio, publication date, citation, and E-E-A-T signals for credibility across all models. This ensures content that is valuable, whether it’s read, ranked, answered, or cited.

 

Marketers also need to understand the need to optimise for AI digestibility. Increasingly, AI systems favour content that is easy to analyse and summarise. Hence the need to use clear, descriptive headings (H2, H3) to structure logic; need to keep paragraphs short (1-3 sentences); the need to avoid jargon, fluff, and promotional words or language; and yes, the use of bullet points and numbered lists for better scannability.

 

Even if users don’t click, a piece of content can still be seen in zero-click surfaces like featured snippets, “People Also Ask”, and AI-generated summaries. For that to happen, one has to work towards answering common questions directly in the first 60 words; use natural language that matches voice search queries; target “People Also Ask” questions with concise, schema-powered answers and most importantly monitor Google’s AI Overviews to see which sources are being pulled and aim to be one of them.

 

SEO, AEO, GEO, and AIEO offer unique advantages in this new landscape of search visibility. But, it’s worth noting that it demands a unified strategy that embraces AEO to answer, AIEO to appear in AI summaries, and GEO to be trusted by generative models. With a bit of focus, and a few rounds of trial and error, it can be done. And done well.

 

The author is chairman, Rediffusion