GEO vs AEO vs SEO: what each one means, and which one your business needs

USE WHENSomeone pitched you GEO or AEO, and you want to know whether it's new work or SEO with a new name.

SEO gets you ranked in a list of links. AEO (answer engine optimisation) gets your content quoted as the direct answer, in featured snippets, voice assistants and AI Overviews. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your business named inside answers that ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity write. They share one foundation, a site machines can read and trust, and differ in what you're aiming for: a click, a quote or a mention.

01Fix the shared foundation first: content in the HTML, crawlers allowed, structured data, one clear page per topic. It pays off in all three.
02Rewrite your key pages answer-first: the question as a heading, a direct two-sentence answer under it, then the detail.
03Measure all three separately: rankings for SEO, snippets and AI Overviews for AEO, and a fixed set of questions asked in AI tools for GEO.

SEO (search engine optimisation) gets your pages ranked in a list of search results. AEO (answer engine optimisation) gets your content picked as the direct answer to a question. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your business named inside the answers AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity write. They share the same foundation and differ in the goal: a click, a quote or a mention.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimisation is the old, familiar one: making your pages rank high in Google and Bing for the words people type. Success is a position in a list, and the reward is a click to your site.

It's built on pages search engines can crawl, content that matches what people search for, a fast site, and links from other sites that vouch for you.

What is AEO?

Answer engine optimisation is about the moment the search engine stops showing a list and just answers: featured snippets, "People also ask" boxes, voice assistants and Google's AI Overviews.

Success is your words being the answer, usually with your site credited. The work is mostly about how a page is written:

A question as the heading, in the words people actually ask it.
A direct answer in the first sentence or two under it.
Then the detail, tables and steps for the person who wants more.
FAQ and HowTo structured data where it fits.

What is GEO?

Generative engine optimisation is about the answers AI assistants write from scratch. When someone asks ChatGPT "which CRM should a five-person agency use?", it writes a paragraph and names a few products. GEO is the work of being one of them.

Success is a mention, often with no link at all. AI tools name businesses that they can read about clearly and that many sources describe consistently, so GEO leans harder than SEO on what other sites say about you: reviews, directories, comparison articles, community answers.

What do GEO, AEO and SEO have in common?

More than the acronyms suggest. All three fail the same way if the foundation is missing:

Crawlers can't read the page. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, many crawlers see an empty page, and AI crawlers are the worst at this. How to check yours.
robots.txt blocks them. A rule meant for one bot often blocks the AI search crawlers too.
Nothing says who you are. Structured data for your organisation and what you sell removes guesswork for all three.
Pages are vague. A page that answers one question plainly does well in every one of them.

The free AI Readiness Checker tests this foundation in about ten seconds.

Which one does my business need?

Look at how your customers decide:


Search Google and compare a few sites	SEO	Rankings and organic clicks
Ask quick factual questions about your field	AEO	Featured snippets and AI Overview citations
Ask an AI assistant to recommend someone	GEO	Mentions across a fixed set of AI questions

Most businesses need the foundation plus one of the others, not three separate projects. And if an agency is selling GEO without first checking whether AI crawlers can read your site at all, start there yourself.

If you want to see where you stand in AI answers today, the free AI visibility check asks ten real customer questions across ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and shows who gets named instead of you.