AEO vs SEO vs GEO
SEO optimises for a ranked list of links. AEO — answer engine optimisation — optimises for being the answer a machine reads out, whether that is a featured snippet, a voice assistant or an AI Overview. GEO — generative engine optimisation — optimises for being cited inside a response a language model composes from several sources. They share techniques but need different measurement.
Where the three overlap
All three reward the same foundations: crawlable HTML, a clear topic per page, fast loading, internal links that make the site's structure obvious, and content that genuinely answers the question. If your SEO fundamentals are broken, AEO and GEO cannot work, because nothing retrieves you in the first place.
That is worth saying plainly, because a lot of AEO advice implies SEO is over. It is not. Retrieval in every answer engine leans heavily on conventional indexing and conventional authority signals.
Where they diverge
SEO optimises the page as a destination. The goal is a click, so titles are written to earn one and content can unfold over the whole page.
AEO optimises a block within the page. The goal is for a machine to extract a 40-80 word passage that fully answers a question without the rest of the page. That means question-shaped headings, direct answers immediately beneath them, and no build-up.
GEO optimises a sentence. The goal is that a model composing an answer from four sources chooses your phrasing. That rewards declarative, self-contained, attributable statements — a number, a date, a named mechanism — and punishes hedging.
How to measure each one
SEO: impressions, average position and clicks in Google Search Console. Reliable, lagging by a few days, and free.
AEO: featured snippet and AI Overview ownership for your target questions, checked on a schedule. Partially visible in Search Console's appearance filters, otherwise checked directly.
GEO: a fixed probe set run against ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, recording mention rate, citation rate and which competitor replaced you. There is no dashboard from the model providers, so this has to be generated.
A sensible order of work
Fix indexing and entity clarity first, because they gate everything. Then restructure your top ten commercial pages answer-first, which serves SEO, AEO and GEO simultaneously. Only then start publishing new pages against the questions where probes show you are absent.
Doing it in the other order — publishing volume before fixing structure — is the most common and most expensive mistake in this space.
Frequently asked questions
Is AEO just a rebrand of SEO?
No, but it is not a replacement either. AEO is a specialisation within SEO focused on extractable answer blocks rather than on the page as a whole.
Which one should a small site start with?
SEO fundamentals plus entity clarity. Both are cheap, they gate everything else, and they improve AI visibility as a side effect.
Do I need separate content for each?
No. One well-structured page — question headings, direct answers, checkable facts, schema — serves all three. Separate content is a symptom of unclear structure, not a requirement.
Related guides
- How to rank in ChatGPT — ChatGPT does not rank pages, it picks sources to cite. Here is what makes a page citable, how to measure it, and the fixes that change the answer.
- AI search visibility — AI search visibility is how often answer engines mention and cite your brand. How to measure it properly, what moves it, and what to ignore.
- Answer-first content structure — The answer-first structure that gets pages lifted into AI answers and featured snippets, with the exact block pattern to use.