SEO vs AEO vs GEO: what's the difference, and which does your business need?

If you've spoken to a marketing agency recently, you've probably heard three acronyms: SEO, AEO and GEO. They sound like separate services. In practice they're three layers of the same job: making sure people find your business when they search, wherever they search.

SEO: search engine optimization

What it is: Optimizing your website so its pages rank in the traditional list of search results on Google and Bing.

What it involves: Technical health (can search engines crawl and index your pages?), relevant content that matches what people search for, and authority from links and mentions on other sites.

Success looks like: Your pages on page one for the searches your customers type, and those visits turning into calls, demos or sales.

AEO: answer engine optimization

What it is: Structuring content so search engines can lift it as the single, direct answer to a question.

Where it shows up: Featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, voice assistants and Google's AI Overviews.

What it involves: Writing clear answers near the top of the page (often in the first 40 to 60 words), using the question as a heading, adding FAQ and how-to structure, and marking it up with schema.

Success looks like: Your wording appears as the answer, even when the searcher doesn't click.

GEO: generative engine optimization

What it is: Making your brand visible inside answers written by AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot.

The term comes from a 2023 research paper titled "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization". The researchers found that some content changes could improve visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40%. Adding quotations, statistics and cited sources performed best. Keyword stuffing actually made things worse.

What it involves: Clear, quotable content with facts and sources; consistent information about your business across the web; and mentions on the review sites, publications and communities AI tools rely on.

Success looks like: When a buyer asks "what's the best [your service] for [their situation]?", your business is named and linked.

How they compare

Why they overlap so much

AI tools don't invent their sources. Google's AI Overviews draw on pages Google already indexes and trusts. ChatGPT's search feature uses its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot, to find pages. A site that is technically sound, clearly written and well linked has a head start in all three.

An Ahrefs study of 75,000 brands found that the factor most strongly linked to appearing in AI Overviews was branded web mentions, how often your brand is talked about across the web. That's classic off-page SEO and PR work.

Which one should you focus on?

• Start with SEO if your site has technical problems, thin pages or no clear page for each service. Everything else builds on it.
• Add AEO once your important pages rank on page one. Winning the snippet or AI Overview on a page that already ranks is often a quick gain.
• Invest in GEO if your buyers research with AI tools before contacting anyone. That's common in SaaS, fintech, professional services and high-ticket purchases.

For most businesses the right answer is all three, in that order, as one plan rather than three separate projects.

Want to know where you stand? The GEO and AEO service pages explain how I check and improve each layer.