SEO vs AEO vs GEO: three different endings to the same query

SEO, AEO and GEO aren't three tactics competing for your budget. They're three different things that can happen after someone types a question into a search box, and each one ends somewhere different.

SEO (search engine optimisation) competes for the click. AEO (answer engine optimisation) competes for the answer box shown above the links. GEO (generative engine optimisation) competes to be one of the sources an AI model reads before it writes an answer of its own.

What do SEO, AEO and GEO each optimise for?

SEO competes for the click, AEO for the extracted answer, and GEO to be a source the model reads. The acronyms get defined constantly, but definitions rarely tell you what changes about your actual work. So here's the comparison as a job list.

The awkward column is the middle one. Winning an answer box often means the searcher never visits your site. That's not a reason to avoid it, but it does mean the metric many teams have reported for years (clicks) stops describing the result.

The foundation is the same for all three

Google is unusually direct about this. Its documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode says there are no additional requirements to appear in them, and no special optimisations needed beyond ordinary SEO best practice. In other words, the basics carry most of the weight:

• The page has to be crawlable: rendered HTML, not behind a login, listed in your sitemap, and not blocked in robots.txt.
• It has to be clearly about one thing.
• It has to be better than what already ranks, because nothing chooses a worse page over a better one on purpose.
• It has to load properly.

Get those wrong and none of the three will work. Get them right and you've done most of the work for all three. Be wary of anyone selling GEO as a separate discipline with its own budget; for most sites, the fundamentals are the whole of it for now.

What GEO adds, as far as anyone can tell

This is the part to be careful with, because nobody outside the AI companies knows exactly how their systems choose sources. What follows is informed guesswork, not established fact.

Write answers that stand alone. A model quoting a sentence from your page gets none of the surrounding context. "It depends on the factors above" is useless on its own. "An AI sales agent automates three of the five stages of outbound" can be quoted as it stands. So put the answer near the top, as a complete statement, before the argument for it.

Be specific. Vague statements are easy to paraphrase without credit. A number, a named framework or a clear threshold is harder to reword, and more likely to be quoted as yours.

Be referenced elsewhere. It seems reasonable that a claim repeated by several independent sources carries more weight than one that appears on a single page. That's also what good PR has always aimed for, and it's why naming an original framework, one that other people can refer to, tends to help. The same logic sits behind answering questions where people ask them: useful answers get repeated.

What AEO adds

Less, and it's more mechanical. Answer boxes lift text, so they favour pages where a question is followed straight away by its answer:

• Headings phrased the way people actually ask the question.
• The answer in the first paragraph under the heading, not the fourth.
• Lists and tables for anything that's naturally a list or a comparison.

You'll still see FAQ structured data recommended for this. It's mostly out of date: since August 2023, Google has only shown FAQ rich results for well-known government and health sites. And any structured data has to describe content people can actually see on the page. We found out the hard way that our own blog's FAQ markup didn't meet that bar (the questions lived in the markup but weren't displayed), so we removed it.

Structured data that backfires

A related lesson from our own site. Our pricing page used to describe itself to Google as a schema.org "Product". That type is meant for physical goods, so Google's merchant listings checks kicked in and started emailing us about a missing shipping policy and return policy for a monthly software subscription. Switching the markup to "SoftwareApplication" stopped the warnings. The general point: structured data should describe what the page really is, not whatever type seems most likely to earn a rich result.

Where to spend your time

If you have to choose, the order isn't controversial.

Start with the fundamentals: crawlable, fast, one topic per page, better than what ranks. Nothing else substitutes for them.

Then make the answers stand alone. It's nearly free: rewriting a page's opening paragraph so it answers the question outright takes a few minutes and helps with all three.

Then work on being referenced. It's slow, and it's the only part that depends on other people. Publish things worth pointing to.

Tools come last. Revtive's SEO agent researches real keyword demand and suggests which articles are worth writing, which is the groundwork all of this sits on. AI visibility trackers sample a set of prompts and report what they saw. That's useful as a rough direction, but it isn't a ranking, so treat the numbers as a thermometer rather than a scoreboard.

How do you measure AEO and GEO?

You can't measure this fully yet, and it's worth being suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

Google counts traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode as part of the normal "Web" search data in Search Console, so it doesn't show up separately. Referrals from tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT do appear in analytics, but they undercount, because plenty of people read an answer, remember a name, and search for it later.

The most useful proxy right now is searches for your brand name. If you're being mentioned in AI answers, more people start searching for you directly. Branded searches rising while overall impressions stay flat is what being cited without being clicked tends to look like. It's indirect, but it's the best signal available.

The unexciting conclusion

GEO isn't a replacement for SEO, and it isn't a new department. It's a handful of writing habits on top of the same foundation, plus one slow requirement (being referenced by others) that looks a lot like what digital PR has always done. The teams that do well with AI search will mostly be the ones that were already good at the unglamorous parts.