The two options
A sampled baseline of how often assistants name and cite you across a fixed panel of commercial prompts.
- Assistants describe your business inaccurately or omit it
- Buyers tell you they researched using an assistant
- You need a number before starting generative work
An assessment of the gap between where you rank and where you are selected for answer surfaces.
- You rank in the top ten but hold few answer positions
- Impressions are rising while clicks fall
- Your queries clearly trigger answer boxes
How they differ
| GEO audit | AEO audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Measures | Being named by assistants | Being selected by search engines |
| Method | Sampled prompt panel | Ranking and surface analysis |
| Prerequisite | Crawlable, extractable content | Existing rankings |
| Time to movement | Three to six months | Four to twelve weeks |
| Depends on third parties | Heavily | Barely |
What actually decides it
The sequencing usually follows from what you already have. Strong rankings with weak answer positions is an AEO problem and the fastest available win, because the authority is paid for and only the shape is wrong. Weak or absent assistant mentions despite decent rankings is a GEO problem, and it takes longer because it depends on sources you do not own.
The audits also differ in what they can promise. An AEO audit produces a concrete list of pages and passages to restructure, with a reasonable expectation of movement inside a quarter. A GEO audit produces a baseline and a scope; movement depends on third-party corroboration accumulating, which no agency controls directly.
Both share one prerequisite worth checking before either: whether crawlers can read your pages at all. Several assistant crawlers execute JavaScript less reliably than Googlebot, so a site that renders acceptably for search can be substantially invisible to them. That check costs an afternoon and occasionally makes both audits unnecessary until it is fixed.
Questions
Can we run both together?
Yes, and it is common, because the content work overlaps heavily. Running them together mainly costs more up front; it rarely produces worse results, since answer-first structure serves both surfaces.
Which shows results sooner?
AEO, usually. You are competing against the handful of pages already ranking rather than against the whole web, and restructuring an existing ranking page can move a position within weeks.
Do we need SEO before either?
The technical part, yes. A page that cannot be crawled or rendered is invisible to both answer engines and assistants, so both audits will simply report that as the constraint.
Related services
- GEO Baseline Audit — GEO
- AEO Readiness Audit — AEO
- Technical SEO Audit — SEO
- Retrieval-Optimized Content — GEO
Still not sure?
Thirty minutes with a senior strategist. We pull your live visibility while we talk and tell you which of these two is actually binding for you — including when the answer is neither. Book a discovery call →