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AEO vs SEO: what we measured on our own site in launch week
SEO decides whether a page ranks. AEO decides whether an AI answer cites you, and what it says about you. Our own numbers from launch week show the gap.
SEO decides whether your page ranks in a list of results. AEO, answer engine optimization, decides whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude cites your page in the answer it writes. It also covers what that answer says about you. GEO, generative engine optimization, is another name for the same job.
They share one foundation. Google says its usual SEO practices apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, and that they need no special structured data. What differs is the measurement. SEO counts positions. AEO counts the share of answers that cite you, over many runs of the same question.
Two measurements on one site, the same week
We moved this site to a new build on 23 September 2026. The next day we measured both.
Rankings. We checked 89 target terms in the US, the UK and Israel. None had us in the top 10. Google was still showing the old WordPress pages, so this is a starting point and not a verdict.
Citations. We asked 30 questions to four engines, OpenAI, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Each ran with web search on, three times per question. That made 360 answers.
| Question type | Example | Answers citing us |
|---|---|---|
| Asks about us by name | “What does synapsereality.io do?” | 105 of 156 |
| Asks for a provider or advice | “Which agency does answer engine optimization for SaaS companies?” | 1 of 204 |
So a site that ranked for nothing was cited in two thirds of the answers that named it. The engines found it through our own pages, the company registry and directory profiles. Asked a question without our name in it, they cited us once. That was an answer about MAP monitoring.
Ranking and citation are separate readings. You can have one without the other. The second row of that table is the number AEO work tries to move.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. In our test, OpenAI, Gemini and Perplexity searched the web before every answer. Claude did for 85 of its 90. A page that doesn’t come back from that search, or can’t be fetched, isn’t among the sources the answer cites. Crawler access also works per engine. OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot for search and GPTBot for training, each with its own robots.txt entry. That is still SEO work, done with a list of AI crawlers next to Googlebot.
The research on changing content for these engines is young. The GEO paper accepted at KDD 2024 tested edits such as adding sources and quotations. Results varied by method and by how visibility was measured. It gives you changes to test, not a result to expect.
What AEO adds that SEO does not measure
A fixed question panel, run many times. One answer is one sample. We reran five of our questions the same day, three times on three engines. All 15 pairs landed within one citation of the first run. Without repeats you can’t tell a change from noise.
What the answer says about you. A rank check tells you where a page sits. It never tells you that the answer describes your company wrongly. In 41 of our 156 brand answers, the engines mentioned NFT, metaverse or Web3 work from our old site. About 15 of them presented it as what we do today. One gave a founding year of 2015, the year a directory profile still lists. We were incorporated in 2018.
The sources the engines read instead of you. For the 204 questions that didn’t name us, this is what the engines cited most:
| Source | Answers citing it |
|---|---|
| A forum site | 25 |
| Google’s developer documentation | 20 |
| 15 | |
| The most-cited agency | 15 |
| Two freelance marketplaces | 15 and 9 |
No single agency owned these answers. The forum and the documentation beat all of them. Being cited there, or on the directories the engines quote, is part of the work. Search Console can’t show it.
Where to start
If you rank for nothing, fix that first. An engine that searches before it answers can’t cite what it doesn’t find. Our technical SEO work covers crawl, indexing and the pages that should rank.
If you rank but never appear in answers, measure before you change anything. Write down ten questions your buyers ask. Ask each engine three times, and log which sources it cites. Our baseline of 360 answers cost $1.39 in API fees. The Claude runs used a subscription.
Then read what the answers say about you, and fix the sources they quote. Our AEO service does this with a fixed panel and reports the sample size with every reading. The free instant audit reads your robots.txt and the HTML a crawler gets, without running JavaScript. If you want the panel run for your company, tell us what you sell.