AEO vs GEO: what's the difference?
Two names for the same change, with a useful distinction between them.
Everything about how a brand is represented inside generated output.
The part that decides whether you are named in the answer.
If you've started reading about AI search, you've seen two acronyms that seem to mean the same thing: AEO and GEO. They overlap a lot, and many people use them interchangeably, but the distinction is worth keeping.
AEO: Answer Engine Optimization
AEO is about the result: whether you appear in the answer an engine produces, and whether it describes you correctly. It covers mentions, recommendations, citations and accuracy in the response a buyer reads.
GEO: Generative Engine Optimization
GEO is about the input: shaping your content and presence so a generative model can understand it, trust it and reuse it. That means clear structure, unambiguous facts, and authority signals a model can pick up.
How they fit together
GEO is the work and AEO is how you score it. You do the GEO work (clarify your content, earn trustworthy citations, fix technical gaps) and measure AEO to see whether that work changed how often and how well AI names you. Brand Climb measures the answer and suggests the input-side changes most likely to affect it.
Why the distinction is worth keeping
The two belong to different people and move at different speeds. GEO work is content, PR and engineering: rewriting an ambiguous page, getting listed on a review site, fixing what a crawler cannot read. AEO measurement is analytics, and it tells you whether any of that worked. Teams that treat them as one thing keep shipping content with no way to tell which parts mattered, and a content program can run for a year that way.
Doing only one of them
If you only measure AEO, the number moves and you cannot say why: an engine updated, a competitor published something, or your own work landed. If you only do GEO, you never find out what worked. Used together, each makes the other useful: change one input on purpose, then watch the questions it should have affected.
Other acronyms
You will also see LLMO, AI SEO and a few others. They describe the same change with different emphasis, and none of them changes the work: find the questions that decide purchases in your category, measure how the engines answer them, fix what you control, and check whether the answer changed. The names will keep changing, and the work will stay the same.