SEO, AEO, GEO: How is it reshaping the product discovery journey?
I got myself hooked on search engine optimisation (SEO) back in 2008/2009. It was the perfect place to start if you're curious about marketing and psychology. It was the ideal starting point to understand how people discover products and brands. As you deep-dive into the search queries of users, you start to analyse the combination of terminology that people were looking for, how it is associated with a brand or product and most importantly, in what context people were looking for those. The findings can provide invaluable insights into how brands and products need to be marketed and positioned.
By the end of the 2010s, the discovery journey for most people typically moved to Social Media instead of Search Engines. Fast-forward to today, and it seems there is a bit of a renaissance for linguistics-based marketing via new AI tools such as Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc.
As a marketer, I’ve been closely observing how consumer behaviour is pivoting. I’ve noticed that there is a declining trust in content on social media due to unidentifiable AI-made content and with the content done by Influencers due to their lazy, disingenuous ways. In addition, people no longer want to click on the blue links and open a thousand tabs from search results. The behaviour is moving to asking complex, conversational questions to smart assistants and AI platforms to get instant, synthesised answers.
So, what's next for the discovery journey? AEO and GEO? Maybe.
Unlike SEO, Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) and Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) operate very differently. So, what are the differences? And, how should brands navigate these?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
What it is: SEO is a long-standing digital marketing practice of optimising your website and content to rank highly on search engines like Google. It relies on technical architecture, authoritative backlinks, site speed and tactical use of keyword analytics.
The goal: Get highly ranked on relevant search queries and drive traffic to the website.
The how: Search engines like Google evaluate the quality of a website or webpage and promote it highly in search results. Various factors drive the impact on the quality score, i.e. optimising meta descriptions, titles, alt texts, URLs, sitemaps, page loading time, other technical site improvements and earning relevant backlinks from topic authoritative domains.
Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)
What it is: AEO is about optimising content for delivering direct answers to the users via featured snippets, knowledge and voice assistants (like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa).
The goal: Since the user doesn’t click to go to the brand website, it is important to win the zero-click moment, i.e. grab attention by providing relevant information to the user.
The how: Most platforms where AEO applies focus on the highest quality and the most authoritative voice for the topic. This means that brands need to focus on developing a strong voice on a few, precise topics. It involves creating a dedicated space for answering typical FAQs, especially questions that have a “what”, “why” and “how”. Structuring it in short, bullet points and simple list-style will make it easier for AI crawlers to absorb concise information.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
What it is: GEO focuses on making your content discoverable, understandable, and most importantly citable by LLMs and AI platforms such as Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc. Users may ask questions comparing 2 specific products or request a deep research on the history, iterations, usage and reviews of a product. To win on such prompts, it is important to provide deep semantic relevance, original data values, expert quotes and relevant authentic information.
The goal: With declining search volume tracking, it is important to maximise these citations. In other words, this will become the new way for indexing a brand website. You shouldn’t expect to drive traffic from these citations and hope for it to compensate for the loss of traffic from SEO.
The how: The AI platforms typically synthesise product comparisons and research instantly, thus compressing the marketing-sales funnel. So, the work done for SEO also supports GEO. In fact, we can take it to a whole new level by providing the most comprehensive information, by providing as many unique details and specs of the product as necessary. This is an opportunity to expand the content strategy, with elaborated explanations and engaging stories never told before from genuine voices from the brand or from the friends of the brand. Similar to SEO, to be successful on GEO, it is important to harmonise the information dispersion strategy in collaboration with the Press and Social Media teams. These AI platforms also give importance to public discourse platforms such as Reddit, Medium, etc., in addition to press features and influencer mentions. Thus, it is now even more important to facilitate communities with curated discussions. Influence strategies are no longer limited to managing talents, press, media or key clients. It should include public discourse, fans and many more.
Conclusion
I believe that we’ve come a full circle to SEO with GEO. When SEO first came onto the scene, most were optimising the website to be just indexed and be visible on search engines. It took many years for SEO experts and digital marketers to discover the need and how to leverage the visibility to drive traffic and conversions.
Similarly, with AEO and GEO, we should start prioritising to capture mindshare and drive brand and product consideration through citations.
The ideal strategy and formula in 2026 and beyond is to treat SEO as a foundational layer on which AEO and GEO get built. While AEO makes content easily extractable for direct responses, GEO will drive AI models to be the decisive factor in whether brands and products are discovered in the future.