SEO, GEO and AEO: What the Acronyms Actually Mean
Two new letters got bolted onto a discipline that already had a name. Here is what each term describes, where the work diverges, and why being sold three budgets for one job should make you suspicious.
Three acronyms are now used to describe getting found online. Most of the work behind them is the same work. Some of it is not, and the difference is worth understanding before someone quotes you separately for each.
Here is what each one means.
SEO, search engine optimisation, is being found in a list of results. Google and Bing crawl your site, decide what each page is about, and rank it against everything else competing for that query.
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is being the answer rather than a link to it. Featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice assistants and answer boxes lift a passage off your page and present it directly.
GEO, generative engine optimisation, is being cited inside an AI-generated answer. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and AI overviews synthesise one response and name a handful of sources. You are not competing for a position. You are competing to be quoted.
Why most of it is the same job
This is inconvenient for anyone selling these separately, but a page that ranks well is usually a page that gets quoted well, because the systems doing the quoting are largely built on top of the same index and the same signals.
A page a crawler cannot reach is a page an AI system cannot cite. A page with no clear structure is hard for a ranking algorithm to categorise and hard for a summariser to extract from. Content that answers a real question directly does well in a list of ten links and does well when something is looking for a passage to lift.
So the foundation does not change. Crawlability, indexation, rendering, sensible architecture, internal linking, matching search intent, and content that deserves to be surfaced. All of that is still the majority of the work. If your site has a technical problem, you do not have an AEO problem or a GEO problem - you have a technical SEO problem, and it is blocking all three.
What changes
Four things are different, and they are worth doing deliberately.
Passages have to stand alone
Classic SEO rewards a page that comprehensively covers a topic. Answer and generative engines extract fragments. That is a different writing constraint.
If the answer to a question only makes sense after three paragraphs of context, it will not be lifted. If it resolves in a sentence or two directly under a heading that states the question, it can be. This is not about writing shorter - it is about making each section self-contained enough to survive being taken out of the page.
The practical version: put the question in the heading, answer it immediately underneath, then expand. Do not build to the answer. Lead with it.
Claims have to be checkable
Vague marketing language has always been weak. It is weaker now.
“We deliver fast turnaround times” gives a summarising system nothing to quote. “Most audits take two weeks” is specific, and specific is quotable. Concrete nouns, real numbers where you have them, and claims a reader could verify are what survive summarisation.
This is also where a lot of sites quietly disqualify themselves. If the only distinguishing claims on your site are ones you invented, you have nothing citable.
Structured data does more work than it used to
Structured data has never been a ranking factor and still is not. What it does is remove ambiguity: it tells a machine what your business is, what a page contains, and which question a given answer belongs to, rather than making it infer that from prose.
Mark up what is on the page - FAQs a visitor can read, real organisation details, real breadcrumbs. Marking up content that is not visible is a guideline violation, and it is the sort of shortcut that gets a site penalised rather than cited.
AI crawler access is now a decision
Your robots.txt probably has rules about AI crawlers that nobody consciously chose - a default from a platform, or a blanket block copied from a forum post.
That is worth an actual decision. Blocking AI crawlers means you will not be cited by the systems that respect the block. Allowing them means your content may be summarised without a click. There is no universally correct answer, and it depends on whether your traffic converts on the page or your visibility matters more than the visit. What is not defensible is not knowing which one you have chosen.
What nobody can promise you
Nobody controls Google’s ranking systems, so nobody can promise you a position. That has always been true.
It is more true for AI answers. These systems do not publish their selection criteria, they change frequently, and the same question can return different sources on different days and to different users. Anyone offering guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or AI overviews is guessing or selling.
Measurement is also worse, and that is worth saying plainly rather than inventing a metric to fill the gap. There is no Search Console for AI assistants. Nobody hands you impressions and clicks. What can be measured: whether you get cited when a defined set of questions is asked, checked on a schedule and recorded; referral traffic from the assistants that pass it; and the conventional signals that feed the same systems.
If an agency shows you a confident “AI visibility score”, ask exactly how it was calculated. The honest answer is usually that someone ran some prompts.
What to do about it
If you want to be found across all three surfaces, in order:
- Fix the technical layer first. Crawlability, indexation, rendering. Nothing else matters if a page cannot be read. See common technical SEO problems.
- Check what a machine sees. View source with JavaScript disabled. If your content is not in the HTML, you are relying on a second pass that may not happen.
- Restructure your key pages around questions. Real questions your customers ask, as headings, answered immediately underneath.
- Replace vague claims with specific ones. Anything you cannot substantiate should be cut rather than softened.
- Add structured data for what is on the page. Organisation, FAQs, breadcrumbs, services.
- Make a deliberate decision about AI crawlers and write it into
robots.txton purpose. - Pick a set of questions you want to be the answer to, and check monthly who currently gets cited.
None of that is exotic. Most of it is the SEO work that was worth doing anyway, applied with an awareness that something other than a person may be reading.
The short version
Treat this as one programme of work with three audiences, not three products. The overlap is large, the new parts are specific and limited, and the acronyms mostly exist because the industry needed something new to sell.
If you want to know how your site currently performs across search results and AI answers, ask us for an audit. We will tell you what is structurally in the way, what is worth fixing first, and what to ignore - see SEO, GEO & AEO for how we approach the three together.