GEO vs AEO vs SEO
SEO is getting your page to rank in a list of links. AEO is getting your content used as the answer. GEO is getting your brand named inside an AI-generated answer. They overlap heavily, and two of the three terms were invented recently by people selling services.
SEO
Search engine optimisation. Making a page rank in the ten blue links.
Everything that has always mattered: what the page is about, whether other sites link to it, how old the domain is, how fast it loads.
It is not dead. Google AI Overviews are built from pages that already rank, so a page nobody can find in normal search doesn't end up in an AI answer either.
AEO
Answer engine optimisation. Getting your content pulled out as the direct answer — a featured snippet, a voice result, a line in an AI Overview.
This is mostly about structure. The question as the heading, the answer in the first sentence, a table instead of a paragraph, a short FAQ. Content an engine can lift without having to interpret it.
GEO
Generative engine optimisation. Getting your brand named inside an answer written by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI.
The difference from AEO is what you're optimising for. AEO is about your page being the source. GEO is about your company being the recommendation. Those are not the same thing — an engine can read your page to build an answer and then name a competitor in it.
That gap is the whole reason the term exists.
The part people get wrong
GEO is not mostly done on your own website.
Measured across SaaS, ecommerce and finance, roughly 70–85% of the sources cited in AI answers are third-party — listicles, review sites, Reddit, other companies' comparison pages. Your own domain is a minority of what the engine reads.
So the work splits in two. Your site has to be readable and factually clear, because the engine checks it. But whether you get named usually depends on pages you don't own.
Do you need all three
You need one thing: to be in the answer when someone asks what to buy.
SEO gets you into the pool the engine draws from. AEO makes your page easy to use. GEO decides whether the name in the answer is yours.
The labels matter less than knowing which of the three is currently broken for you.
Where the terms came from
SEO has been around since the late 1990s. AEO appeared with featured snippets and voice search. GEO comes from a 2024 academic paper and was picked up by the industry when AI Overviews launched.
Some people use LLMO or AI SEO for the same thing. There's no agreed definition and the boundaries move. Treat the labels as shorthand, not categories.