The overlap with AEO is real, and it is worth being honest about: the two labels describe the same discipline from slightly different angles. "Generative engine" stresses that the AI composes a new answer out of several sources, so your job is to be one of the sources it draws on and credits. "Answer engine" stresses the output format — a direct answer instead of a list of links. The terms emerged in parallel and practitioners use them interchangeably, so if you are deciding which one to search for or hire around, don't overthink it. Optimize to be retrieved, understood, and cited, and you have done both.
The work itself is concrete, whatever you call it. Open every page with a direct, self-contained answer to the question it targets, because generative engines lift quotable passages rather than skimming for keywords. Add structured data so machines can parse your entities, FAQs, and definitions without guessing, and publish an llms.txt file that points AI crawlers at your most citable pages. Above all, keep claims specific and verifiable: a generative engine synthesizes across sources, and vague or hyped copy rarely survives that synthesis intact.
Brohns treats GEO as an ongoing agent job rather than a one-off consulting report. Its GEO auditor scans how findable your site is in AI answers like ChatGPT and Perplexity, benchmarks you against competitors, and generates concrete fixes. Each fix arrives as a written proposal with the audit finding behind it, so you apply changes knowing exactly why — the same wait-for-your-go pattern that governs every email a Brohns agent drafts. That review step matters more in GEO than almost anywhere else, because GEO advice is easy to overclaim; seeing the auditor's actual findings keeps the work anchored to what AI engines can verify about your site.