GEO, AEO and SEO: how brands get cited in AI search

Search a question today and the first thing you read is often an answer written by AI, not a list of links. Google's AI Overviews reached more than 200 countries and 40 languages in May 2025, and AI Mode, the conversational version, had expanded to over 200 countries by October 2025. In Korea, Naver puts its own AI Briefing at the top of results.

When the answer ends inside the results page, people click less. So the question brands ask has changed. It used to be "where do we rank?" Now it is also "are we cited in the answer?" This piece covers the two names for that work, GEO and AEO, and what actually moves it.

People really do click less

• Pew Research Center analysed 68,879 real searches by 900 US adults in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a regular result 8% of the time, against 15% when there was no summary. Only 1% clicked a link inside the summary.
• In the same study, 26% of searches with a summary ended the session right there, compared with 16% without one.
• Ahrefs compared 300,000 keywords and found that with an AI Overview present, the #1 result's click-through rate was 58% below what would otherwise be expected (February 2026).
• Seer Interactive looked at 53 brands and 5.47 million queries. On informational queries, brands cited in the AI Overview had a 2.07% click-through rate; brands not cited had 0.94%. That is correlation, not proof of cause, but the direction is clear.

Total clicks are shrinking while the gap between cited and uncited brands widens. That gap is what GEO and AEO are about.

SEO, AEO and GEO at a glance

	What it optimises for	Goal	What you measure
SEO (search engine optimisation)	The list of results	Rank and get the click	Position, impressions, CTR
AEO (answer engine optimisation)	The direct answer to a question	Be chosen as the answer	Answer placements, citations
GEO (generative engine optimisation)	Answers written by AI	Be cited or mentioned in them	Citation frequency, position in the answer

These are not separate disciplines. Google's own guidance on optimising for AI search treats AEO and GEO as part of SEO, for a simple reason: a page that is not indexed cannot be used in an AI answer either.

Where the term GEO comes from

GEO comes from the paper "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization", first posted in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024, by researchers from IIT Delhi and Princeton University.

They built a benchmark of 10,000 queries across 25 domains, then rewrote source pages nine different ways and watched how often a generative engine, answering from the top five search results, used each page. What they found:

• What worked: citing sources, adding quotations, adding statistics and improving fluency. These lifted a page's visibility in the answer by up to around 40% over doing nothing.
• Keyword stuffing backfired. Pages padded with keywords in the old SEO style did worse than the baseline.
• Lower-ranked sites gained the most. For the site ranked fifth, citing sources alone raised visibility by 115%, while the top-ranked site lost 30% on average. AI answers can reopen a race that rankings had closed.
• What works depends on the domain. Statistics helped most in law and government topics, sources in fact-based questions, and quotations in people and history topics.

What Google says

In its guidance on AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google stresses the following:

• The page has to be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet.
• Write unique, first-hand content rather than what is already everywhere, with clear headings.
• Keep important content in text, not inside images.
• Structured data is not required, but where you use it, it should match what is visible on the page.
• You do not need an llms.txt file or a rewrite "for AI". Mass-producing pages for every query variant counts as scaled content abuse.

There is now a way to measure it, too. In June 2026 Search Console introduced a generative AI performance report that shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode separately, and it reached all sites by the end of August.

What to do now

1. Make sure you are indexed. Register the site in Google Search Console, and in Naver Search Advisor if Korea matters to you, and submit a sitemap. AI answers are still built from indexed documents.
2. Answer the question straight away. Use the questions people actually ask as headings, and answer in the first paragraph beneath them.
3. Add sources, numbers and quotations. This was the most reliable win in the GEO experiments. Drop vague claims and state what can be checked.
4. Write what only you can say. First-hand experience and your own data get cited; generic explanations do not.
5. Measure citations. Watch the generative AI report in Search Console, and keep a list of key questions to check regularly for whether your brand appears in the answer.

FAQ

Are GEO and AEO the same thing?

They overlap but aim at different things. AEO is about being chosen as the direct answer to a question; GEO is about being cited or mentioned inside answers that AI writes. Both start from indexed documents, which is why they are best seen as an extension of SEO.

Do I need an llms.txt file for AI search?

Google says you do not need an llms.txt file or a rewrite "for AI". Being indexed, being eligible to show with a snippet and having unique content come first.

How can I tell whether AI answers cite my brand?

Google Search Console's generative AI performance report shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode separately. Alongside it, keep a list of key questions and check regularly whether your brand appears in the answers.

How ViralPoint sees it

We think of search-driven growth in four steps: read what people are asking (Signal), answer with content that has evidence behind it (Studio), distribute it and check every published output against its source (Flow), and measure what the answer moved (Proof). Those are the four layers of VADENGINE, our ad-tech engine.

AI search does not change that order. What changes is the last step: what we measure now reaches beyond rank to citation. ViralPoint designs and builds that flow as a custom system for each brand.