GEO and AEO Are Not the Same Thing (and Why pendziuch.com Scored 78/100 on Its Own Test)

We already covered AEO — getting your business to show up when someone asks an AI a question. But there’s a second, more technical layer that explains how that AI decides what to cite and what to ignore. That layer is called GEO — Generative Engine Optimization.

Are AEO and GEO the same thing? In practice, most of the industry uses them as synonyms — and so far there’s no academic consensus drawing a clear line between the two. Still, the nuance is worth understanding.

What exactly is GEO

The term comes from a 2023 academic paper (“GEO: Generative Engine Optimization”), which showed something concrete: applying specific optimization techniques can boost a site’s visibility inside AI-generated answers by up to 40%. It’s not a marketing promise — it’s a measured result.

While AEO asks «do I show up in the answer?», GEO asks something more precise: «is my content built so an AI can extract, summarize and cite it with confidence, even if it’s not the only source used?»

The real case: we tested it on our own site

Instead of explaining it in the abstract, we measured it. We ran an “AI agent readability” audit on pendziuch.com and scored 78 out of 100 — grade B. Not perfect, not bad: right at the point where there’s something worth showing.

The findings were concrete: some sections lacked enough semantic structure, there were no trust anchor pages (About/Contact/Privacy) that an AI checks before recommending you, and there were no clear instructions for when an agent should use us as a source. We’re fixing this live, on this very site — so if you re-audit pendziuch.com in a few weeks, the number should be different.

How a business starts optimizing for this

1. Measure first. Don’t optimize blind — run an audit of your own site at is-agentic.com and see what’s failing.
2. Write to be cited, not just read. Sentences that make complete sense on their own, without depending on the previous paragraph — so an AI can extract them without losing context.
3. Add real trust pages. About, contact, policies — with real content, not an empty form.
4. Tell agents when to use you. An llms.txt file with clear instructions is worth more than ten pages of generic marketing copy.
5. Measure again. GEO isn’t a one-time checkbox, it’s a discipline of continuous adjustment.

What doesn’t change

Neither AEO nor GEO replace having something good to offer. What they do is make that “something good” visible in a world where more and more people ask an AI first, not a search engine.

Want to know how your site scores on this kind of audit today? Write to me and we’ll run it together.