- SEO — rank your pages in search results people click.
- AEO — be the direct answer an engine gives.
- GEO — be named and cited inside AI-generated answers in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI surfaces.
GEO, AEO and SEO
SEO (search engine optimization)
Improving how pages rank in classic search results. Success is measured in rankings, impressions and clicks. For fashion and beauty, SEO has meant category pages, product pages and content that rank for searches like “linen dresses” or “niacinamide serum”.
AEO (answer engine optimization)
Structuring content so that an engine can lift it as a direct answer — originally featured snippets and voice assistants, now AI answers too. AEO emphasises clear questions and concise, factual answers.
GEO (generative engine optimization)
Improving how often and how accurately generative AI assistants mention, recommend and cite your brand and products. Success is measured by visibility in answers, position in the recommended list, share of voice against competitors and the sources cited. For a store, GEO is largely about product facts, crawler access and third-party consensus.
| SEO | GEO / AEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Where you appear | A list of links | Inside a generated answer |
| How many win | Ten links on page one | Usually three to five named products |
| Main metric | Ranking, clicks | Mentions, position, share of voice, citations |
| What drives it | Relevance, links, technical health | Quotable facts, crawler access, consensus across sources |
| Shared foundations | Crawlable pages, server-rendered content, structured data, authority | |
Measurement terms
AI visibility
How often your brand or products appear in AI assistant answers to a defined set of questions, usually expressed as a percentage of answers.
Prompt (tracked prompt)
A question asked to an AI assistant on a schedule to measure visibility — for example “best vegan leather ankle boots”. Good prompt sets mirror what real shoppers ask and leave your brand name out.
Share of voice
Your mentions as a share of all brand mentions across a set of answers. It shows how you compare to competitors, not just whether you appear.
Position
Where your brand or product appears in an answer's list. Earlier positions get more attention.
Citation (source)
A web page an assistant links to or draws on for its answer. Citation analysis shows which publications, retailers and communities shape answers in your category.
SKU-level visibility
Visibility measured per product rather than per brand: which products are named for which questions, and whether the assistant states their price and attributes correctly.
Technical terms
AI crawlers
Bots that fetch web pages for AI companies. They do different jobs: training crawlers (for example OpenAI's GPTBot or Anthropic's ClaudeBot) collect data to train models; search crawlers (for example OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) index pages for live answers; and user agents (for example ChatGPT-User) fetch a page while answering a specific person. Blocking a training crawler and blocking a search crawler have very different effects.
robots.txt
A file at the root of your site that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. Rules can name specific AI crawlers or apply to all bots through a wildcard.
Bot protection (WAF)
Firewall and CDN rules that challenge or block automated traffic. They can block AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them, so both need checking.
Server-side rendering
Producing the page's HTML on the server, so the text is present in the response. Most AI crawlers read that response and do not run JavaScript like a browser; pages assembled only in the browser can look empty to them.
Structured data / schema.org
Machine-readable descriptions of content, usually in JSON-LD. For stores the key types are Product and Offer on product pages and Organization on the home page.
llms.txt
A proposed convention: a Markdown file at the site root that summarises the site for language models and links to key pages. Cheap to add; not confirmed as a ranking signal by the major assistants.
XML sitemap
A file listing your URLs so crawlers can find them, including new and seasonal products. It should be referenced in robots.txt.
Commerce terms
AI shopping assistant
An AI system that helps a shopper research and choose products — general assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, or a brand's own on-site assistant.
Agentic commerce
Shopping where an AI agent acts on the shopper's behalf — comparing products and, increasingly, completing checkout. It depends on accurate, machine-readable product data, prices, stock and policies.
Agentic Commerce Protocol
An open protocol introduced by OpenAI with Stripe in 2025 that lets merchants offer checkout inside ChatGPT.
Product feed
A structured file of your catalog — for example for Google Merchant Center — that shopping surfaces, including AI ones, use for product data, prices and availability.
Where to go next
- How to get your fashion brand recommended by AI assistants
- How to get beauty and skincare products recommended by AI
- The AI-ready product page checklist
- Research: AI readiness of 322 fashion and beauty stores
- AI visibility tools compared
Get your products named when shoppers ask AI
Sayrank tracks how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity answer your shoppers' questions, fixes what stops AI crawlers on your site, and rewrites your product pages so assistants can quote them. Built for fashion and beauty brands.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between GEO and SEO?
SEO aims to rank pages in a list of search results that people click. GEO aims to have your brand and products named, accurately, inside answers generated by AI assistants. They share foundations — crawlable pages, clear content, authority — but GEO is measured by mentions and citations in answers rather than by rankings and clicks.
Is AEO the same as GEO?
In practice the terms are used almost interchangeably. AEO (answer engine optimization) emerged first, around featured snippets and voice assistants; GEO (generative engine optimization) describes the same goal for generative AI assistants.
Does SEO still matter if shoppers use ChatGPT?
Yes. AI assistants that search the web draw heavily on search indexes, and shoppers who use AI for research still use classic search most of the time. Good SEO foundations support GEO.