0:00Introduction
Lesson 1.1: SEO, AEO and GEO: what really changes.
0:07Three acronyms, one goal
SEO, AEO, GEO: three acronyms you hear everywhere. Let's see what they mean, without the jargon. SEO is the work of getting your site's pages to show up in the results of Google and the other search engines. You measure it in rankings, impressions and clicks. GEO, generative engine optimization, is the work of getting your business, or one of your pages, cited inside the answers that AI assistants generate. The term comes from a study by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi, published in 2023. AEO, answer engine optimization, is another name for the same practice. In this course, we'll use the two together.
0:54What stays the same
First, the good news: SEO isn't dead. It's the foundation. A site that search engines can read, pages that answer what people are looking for, and other sites that mention you. You need them for Google, and you need them for AI: many answers start from a web search, and if your pages can't be found, they're unlikely to get cited.
1:16What changes
So what changes? Three things. First, the outcome. On Google, you get a position in a list. In a generated answer, you're either named, or you're not. Second, who gets picked. In an Ahrefs study of fifteen thousand questions, only 12% of the URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot were also in Google's top 10 for the same question. Third, how you measure it. For SEO, rankings and clicks are what count. To get cited, what counts is how often you're named across a fixed set of questions, engine by engine.
1:53Why it matters
Why does it matter? Because when a generated answer shows up, people click less on the classic results. Seer Interactive tracked over three thousand searches: where Google showed an AI Overview, the organic click-through rate fell from 1.76% to 0.61%, between June 2024 and September 2025. But in the same analysis, brands cited in the AI Overview had a 35% higher organic click-through rate. Getting cited makes the difference.
2:27The mistake to avoid
The most common mistake is thinking you need new tricks, written specially for AI. The GEO study found that adding statistics, expert quotes and sources to a text raises its visibility in generated answers by up to 40%. One caveat: that was on a research benchmark, not on a real engine. In practice, these are the same things that make a page useful and credible to a person.
2:53Your task for today
Your task for today: write down three questions a customer of yours would ask an AI assistant before choosing a business like yours. Ask them on Google and on an AI assistant, and note in the course worksheet: do you show up in the results? Are you named in the answer?
3:19Next lesson
In the next lesson: how an AI engine chooses the sources it cites. See you there.