Generative engine optimisation (GEO)
A second name for roughly the same work. The term has an academic origin that most vendor usage has drifted a long way from.
Contested term · no agreed definition
What it means
GEO entered circulation through a 2023 research paper studying how content changes affected inclusion in generated answers. What agencies now sell under the name is usually the same bundle sold as AEO: structure, entity consistency, third-party mentions.
Why it matters for an HVAC company
Because you will be quoted for both. Some agencies present AEO and GEO as two services with two prices. Ask what deliverable sits in one and not the other, and be ready for the answer to be nothing.
What would settle it
The same way as anything else here: prompt set, named engines, cadence, verbatim capture. The label on the invoice does not change what can be measured.
A worked example
Of the fourteen companies scored on this site, several use AEO and GEO interchangeably within a single page. One states plainly that AEO, GEO and LLM SEO describe the same work and declines to sell four services for it. That sentence is worth more than most of the definitions.
The limit on that
The research the term comes from studied content variations under test conditions. It is not evidence that a commercial agency's version produces the same effect.