The short answer
SEO competes for a position in a list of links. AEO competes to be the single direct answer to a question. GEO competes to be one of the sources a generated answer is built from and names.
They overlap heavily in technique and not at all in how you measure success, which is where most of the confusion comes from.
The comparison in one table
| SEO | AEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you win | A position in a list | The direct answer slot | Inclusion in a generated answer |
| Where it shows | Results pages | Snippets, AI Overviews, voice | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode |
| Unit of work | The page | The question and answer pair | The passage |
| Main lever | Relevance, links, technical health | Format and directness | Source quality and corroboration |
| Measured by | Position and clicks | Answers held and lost | Share of answers naming you |
| Typical horizon | Months | Weeks | Weeks to months |
| Can you guarantee it? | No | No | No |
Why the terms blur
Three reasons, and all of them are legitimate.
- The surfaces blur. A Google AI Overview is a generated answer sitting on a results page, so it is arguably all three at once.
- The techniques overlap. Answer-first writing helps in every one of them.
- The foundation is shared. All three depend on a site that can be crawled, rendered and understood.
So anyone insisting on rigid boundaries is overselling the distinction. The useful question is not which label applies, it is which outcome you are being measured on.
Which should you do first?
In almost every case, in this order.
- Technical SEO. If pages are not crawled, rendered and indexed, nothing else matters. This is also what AI crawlers depend on.
- AEO. Fastest visible movement, because format fixes on pages that already rank can change answer ownership in weeks.
- GEO. Entity and corroboration work, which compounds and takes months.
- Classic SEO content and links. Ongoing, and the slowest of the four.
The common mistake is starting at step four because it is the familiar one, while step one is silently blocking everything.
How does the reporting differ?
This is where the three genuinely separate, and where you should push back on an agency.
| Discipline | A good report shows | A bad report shows |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Positions, clicks and conversions | Impressions in isolation |
| AEO | Answers held, lost and newly available | A screenshot of one snippet |
| GEO | Share of answers naming you, across repeated runs | A single ChatGPT screenshot |
The right-hand column matters. Model answers vary between runs, so one screenshot is not evidence of anything. If that is the proof on offer, ask what the other runs said.
Do you need all three?
Not necessarily, and the honest answer depends on your buyers.
If nobody in your category asks an assistant anything yet, GEO is a bet on behaviour that has not arrived in your market, and your money is better spent elsewhere for now. If your buyers research heavily before contacting anyone, it may already be the most valuable of the three.
AEO is worth doing for almost everyone, because it is cheap, fast, and improves the page for humans as a side effect.
What a sensible first ninety days looks like
If you are starting from nothing across all three, this sequence wastes the least money.
| Weeks | Focus | Why here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 2 | Indexation and rendering audit | Everything else depends on pages being fetchable |
| 2 to 4 | Fix what the audit found | Usually the largest single unlock |
| 4 to 6 | Entity consistency across the web | Cheap, slow to show, compounds |
| 6 to 10 | Answer-first rewriting of key pages | Fastest visible movement |
| 8 to 12 | Measurement baseline across assistants | So later claims can be checked |
| Ongoing | Content and corroboration | The slow half, started once the rest is sound |
Notice that nothing in the first six weeks involves publishing. That is deliberate, and it is the part clients most often want to skip.
Questions to ask an agency pitching AI search
Five that separate people doing the work from people repeating the terminology.
- How do you measure AI visibility? If the answer is a screenshot, stop. It should be a fixed prompt set run repeatedly, reported as a trend.
- What happens if our site is client-rendered? They should immediately want to compare raw HTML against the rendered DOM. If this does not come up, they are not technical.
- Can you guarantee citation? The correct answer is no. Any other answer tells you what you need to know.
- What would you do first? Entity consistency and crawler access should come before content. If the first answer is a content calendar, ask why.
- What does llms.txt do? It is an unratified convention with unverified support. Anyone calling it a ranking factor is guessing.
When none of this is your problem
Worth saying plainly, because the honest answer sometimes is that you should spend the money elsewhere.
If your category has no assistant-led research behaviour yet, GEO is a bet on something that has not arrived. If your site is small, clean and fully indexed, technical SEO has little left to give. If you are already the default answer in your niche, the work is defensive rather than transformative.
And if your actual constraint is that too few people have ever heard of you, none of the three fixes that. Referring domains, reputation and reach do, and they are a different budget line.
A worked example: the same page through all three lenses
Take one page, a service page about invoice automation, and look at what each discipline would change about it. The differences are concrete.
| Discipline | What it changes | What success looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Classic SEO | Title, internal links, topical depth, backlinks | Rises for invoice automation |
| AEO | Adds a direct answer under each heading, a cost range, a steps list | Takes the snippet |
| GEO | Makes the company entity consistent, adds schema, ensures crawlers get the text | Cited by ChatGPT |
Three things are worth noticing. First, none of them conflict: every change in the AEO row improves the page for the SEO row too. Second, the GEO row contains almost no writing, which is why it is so often skipped by content-led agencies. Third, only the first row depends on competitors, which is why it is the slowest.
In practice you do not run three projects. You run one piece of work on the page and report it against three different measures, which is the honest version of what most agencies describe as an integrated strategy.
What changes if AI search keeps growing?
Worth thinking about, with the caveat that nobody knows, including us.
The direction that seems reasonably safe to plan for is that the number of queries that end without a click keeps rising. That does not make websites irrelevant, because the answer still has to come from somewhere, but it does change what a website is for: less a destination, more a source that gets quoted.
If that holds, three things get more valuable and two get less.
- More valuable: being the clearest statement of a fact, having consistent information everywhere, and being mentioned by sources you do not control.
- Less valuable: ranking for high-volume informational terms that an answer now satisfies, and content published for volume rather than to answer something specific.
The practical hedge is that everything in the first list also helps conventional search. There is no version of the future where consistent facts and clearly answered questions become a liability, which makes it an unusually safe place to put effort while the picture is unsettled.
Where to read more
We have longer pieces on each: answer engine optimisation, generative engine optimisation, and how to rank in ChatGPT.
The service pages are AEO, GEO and technical SEO.
If you want to know which of the three your site actually needs, our free AI visibility audit will tell you, including when the answer is that your constraint is conventional SEO.