What is AI SEO? GEO and AEO in plain language.

“AI SEO” is used for two different things: a site appearing as a source in AI answers such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews, and SEO work being done with AI tools. The technical names for the first are GEO and AEO; both rest on classic SEO.

Alongside “GEO” and “AEO”, Turkish searches also include “yapay zeka SEO”, the Turkish for AI SEO: what AI SEO is, AI SEO specialist, AI SEO tool. Because the same two words can describe different services, you first need to separate what is being talked about. This guide explains the terms, Google’s official position and the questions to ask when buying a service in this area.

What does “AI SEO” mean?

It has two separate meanings. The first is a site appearing on AI-powered search surfaces: systems such as AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google, ChatGPT search and Perplexity produce a single answer to a question and place a few sources beneath it. The goal is to be one of those sources.

The second is the SEO work itself being done with AI tools: keyword research, content drafts, meta descriptions, technical audits. This is a method, not a goal. If a proposal says “AI SEO”, asking which of the two is meant clarifies the scope of the work from the start.

GEO, AEO and LLMO: which is which?

The term GEO (generative engine optimization) comes from an academic paper published in November 2023 and accepted to KDD 2024; the paper defines it as an approach to increasing the visibility of content in the responses of generative engines. AEO (answer engine optimization) aims at a question being answered directly. LLMO (large language model optimization) is another name used for the same field.

All three largely require the same work; they differ in goal and in measurement. A detailed comparison is in the guide AEO vs GEO vs SEO. That is why searching for all of them in Turkish as “AI SEO” is not wrong; it is just incomplete.

What has changed from classic SEO, and what has not?

What has changed is the form of the result: the user sees a single answer instead of ten links, and clicks less. What has not changed is the foundation: according to Google’s documentation on AI features, there are no additional requirements or special optimizations needed to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It is enough for the page to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet; the documentation also says there is no need for additional machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema markup.

What the documentation recommends are familiar SEO practices too: allowing crawling, making content findable through internal links, a good page experience, providing important content as text, and keeping structured data consistent with the visible text. Traffic from AI features also appears in Search Console’s Performance report, within the “Web” search type; since August 31, 2026 there is also a generative AI report that shows impressions only.

When did AI Mode and AI Overviews launch in Turkey?

In February 2026, Google announced that AI Mode and AI Overviews, powered by the Gemini 3 model family, had come to Search in Turkey; the features are rolling out gradually in the Google app and on the search results page. This layout, with the answer at the top and the sources below it, is now a local reality in Turkish searches. We explained how the mode works in the Google AI Mode guide.

Does producing content with AI harm SEO?

According to Google, what matters is the result, not the method of production. Its documentation on generative AI content does not forbid using the tools; it asks for attention to accuracy, quality and relevance, and reminds you that models do not look up facts but predict likely sequences of words, which is why verification is needed before publishing. The line is drawn in the spam policies: producing many pages with AI or similar tools without adding value for users may count as “scaled content abuse”.

In other words, AI can be used as a writing tool; it is not a way to publish hundreds of template pages at once. Titles, descriptions, structured data and image alt text must go through the same review.

What needs to be done?

In practice the work divides into five levers: access (can crawlers reach the page), readability (is the answer in a passage that can be quoted on its own), intelligibility (is it clear to the machine who you are and what you do), credibility (can the claims be verified, do other sources mention you) and measurement. The details of each are in the guide answer engine optimization.

The most often skipped part of access is the first HTML. If a page’s text only appears once JavaScript runs in the browser, a browser or bot that does not run JavaScript sees the page as blank; that is why Google’s documentation recommends providing important content in text form, and why it belongs to access. When we measured 40 AI-built sites, 45% of them had fewer than 50 words on the page before JavaScript ran; we report the results in our measurement article. If you find the problem, the fix is to produce the page on the server or to build it before publishing; some of the sites we measured already did this. The quick way to test your own site is to open the page source and check whether your text is there. Our Machine reading tool asks the same question for an address and shows line by line what the page tells a machine.

What should you ask when buying an AI SEO service?

• Goal · appearing in AI answers, or doing SEO work with AI?
• Foundation · have the site’s crawling, indexing and speed been measured?
• Promise · is a guarantee like “first place in AI” being given? (Google does not even guarantee indexing)
• Extra file · is a special file or markup being sold as “required”?
• Content · is bulk AI content being proposed, or verified content?
• Measurement · how will success be measured: Search Console, citation monitoring, conversions?

The answers to most of these questions lie within classic SEO. We treat visibility in AI answers as a separate service; the method is on the GEO consulting page.

If you want to know how your brand is cited in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, our GEO consulting records which questions and engines cite you and builds the prerequisites.