What is the difference between SEO, GEO and AEO?
Over the past few years the search visibility of an organisation's website has split into three separate channels: the classic list of links, direct answer boxes, and the answers synthesised by generative AI. Three acronyms circulate for those three channels. Allocating budget without understanding the difference usually means doing none of the three jobs properly.
What the three acronyms mean
SEO, search engine optimisation, is a twenty-five-year-old discipline with a clear goal: moving a page up the list of search results. It rests on a triangle of technical foundations, content quality and external link authority.
AEO, answer engine optimisation, does not target a ranking position but being the source of the answer. Featured snippets, voice assistant replies and the People also ask boxes are the surfaces of this channel. What matters here is not where you rank, but whether you wrote clearly enough to answer the question outright.
GEO, generative engine optimisation, is about being cited when a generative system composes an answer. The user never sees a single page; the model reads dozens of sources and produces one piece of text. The question becomes simple: are you inside that text?
Why it split into three jobs
The first reason is behaviour. The share of searches where the user finds the answer on the results page and leaves without clicking anything has been rising for years. That means a page can lose traffic while its ranking has not moved at all. The link between position and visit is no longer as tight as it was.
The second reason is generative interfaces. When someone asks an AI assistant a question, they do not get ten blue links, they get one paragraph. Visibility is no longer a position in a list but a citation inside a sentence, and measurement has to change accordingly.
What AEO means in practice
Use a clear heading, answer the question near the start and expand with the detail it needs. There is no universal word count: the subject determines the appropriate length.
Structured data can describe supported content types and should match the visible content. Google does not require a separate schema or special markup for its AI search features.
What GEO means in practice
A generative model is looking for a quotable sentence. We are the leader in our sector cannot be quoted, because it carries nothing verifiable. We produced interactive e-learning content for the Ministry of National Education's EBA platform can be quoted, because it names an institution, a field and a subject. Text with original data, precise definitions and verifiable institution names surfaces in this channel.
The second centre of gravity sits outside your own site. Independent sources where your brand name appears alongside the topic, press coverage, official registries and trade publications are all part of the text the model reads. Classic digital PR gains a new function here: it now feeds the model as well as the human reader.
The foundation that has not changed
A crawlable page with useful text and a usable interface is a shared foundation. Relying on an interaction that may fail to load for essential content can create access and crawling problems.
On measurement, looking at a single number is misleading. Clicks and impressions in Search Console, referral traffic arriving from AI interfaces and the search volume of your brand name have to be tracked separately. These three curves can move in different directions, and that is normal; reading one as a proxy for another produces bad decisions.