GEO and AEO: what the research actually says about AI search · Okane Land<br>dark

The Study · Explainer<br>AEO and GEO: one real study, a pile of mythology, and a traffic cliff<br>the editors · 12 min read · researched<br>Generative and answer engine optimization are mostly the SEO industry reselling one real research finding. Here is what genuinely moves AI citations, what is mythology, and the traffic story that matters more than either.<br>In 2024, a team led out of IIT Delhi and Princeton ran the first controlled experiment on getting content cited by AI search engines. They tested nine ways to rewrite a page. The one tactic the entire SEO industry was built on, stuffing a page with the keywords people search for, scored about 10% worse than doing nothing at all. Adding citations, real statistics, and direct quotes lifted a page’s visibility in AI answers by up to 40%. That paper, “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization,” is the closest thing this field has to a foundation. Almost everything sold on top of it is mythology.

The reason this matters is not academic. When Google puts an AI summary at the top of the results, people stop clicking. Pew Research tracked 68,879 real Google searches and found users clicked a normal result link 8% of the time when an AI summary was present, versus 15% when it was not, and clicked a link inside the summary itself just 1% of the time. Since AI Overviews launched, the share of news searches that end with no click to a publisher rose from 56% to nearly 69%. The traffic is draining off the open web and into the answer box. So the question every founder and marketer is now asking is fair: if AI is going to summarize me instead of sending me visitors, how do I at least get cited in the summary? The answer has a name, two names actually, AEO and GEO, and an industry selling tools around them. This is what the research supports, what it does not, and where the money is going. It is the same method as our look at whether AI coding really makes you faster: follow the funding, and trust the people measuring the gap over the people selling the close.

The short version

If you are shipping to earn and want to be found by AI search, the evidence backs a short list and contradicts a long one.

It is still SEO. Google’s own 2026 documentation says optimizing for AI search “is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO,” because the AI features run on the same ranking systems. The page still has to be indexed and good. There is no separate AI funnel to game.

Credibility beats tricks. The one controlled study found that citing your sources, adding real numbers, and quoting experts measurably raised AI visibility. Keyword stuffing and a more “authoritative” tone did nothing. Write things that are true and well-supported, not things that sound confident.

Get mentioned where AI reads. AI answers lean heavily on Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, and earned media, not on whoever bought a GEO tool. Being talked about on third-party sites tracks with AI visibility far more than backlinks do.

Ignore the file-and-schema mythology. An llms.txt file is not read by any major engine. Special schema markup does not move AI citations in controlled tests. Both are sold hard and backed by nothing.

Do not confuse cited with chosen. Most AI citations do not even name the brand, AI search engines get their source attributions wrong more than half the time, and getting cited is not getting recommended. It is a noisy target. Build for the reader who clicks through, because clicks are scarce and trust is the only durable asset.

Everything below is the evidence, including the parts that argue with the bullets.

What AEO and GEO actually are

Two terms, very different pedigrees. GEO, generative engine optimization, comes from research. It was introduced in a 2023 paper by Pranjal Aggarwal, Vishvak Murahari and colleagues, first posted to arXiv in November 2023 and published at KDD 2024, one of the top peer-reviewed venues in the field. It has a definition, a benchmark, and an experiment behind it. AEO, answer engine optimization, comes from marketing. There is no founding paper and no clean origin. The term is usually traced to SEO consultant Jason Barnard, whose own site dates the coinage to 2017 in one place and 2018 in another, with his earliest concrete public use being a 2018 BrightonSEO talk. Even the people selling AEO cannot agree what it is: as of early 2026 there is no consensus definition separating AEO from GEO, LLMO, AIO, and “AI SEO,” and the labels get used interchangeably.

The cleanest definition comes from the company that owns the index. Google’s position, in its 2026 Search Central documentation, is that “optimizing for generative AI search is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO,” because its AI features are “rooted in our core Search ranking and quality systems.” The most authoritative voice in the room says the new discipline is the old discipline. Hold onto that....