AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what actually differs, and what overlaps.
Three names for overlapping work. Here is what each one means, where they genuinely differ, and why you should buy the work rather than the acronym.
AEO
Answer Engine Optimization
Making your business the answer an AI assistant gives: when ChatGPT or Perplexity names two or three businesses, AEO is the work of being one of them.
GEO
Generative Engine Optimization
The academic name for the same goal, coined for engines that generate answers. The KDD 2024 research that measured what actually works was published under this term.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization
The twenty-year-old craft of ranking in a list of links. Its technical half, crawlability, structured data, question-shaped pages, is most of how you get cited by assistants too.
The same work counts twice.
Most of what moves an AI answer is technical SEO wearing a new name.
A site an assistant can crawl, structured data that declares what you are, published prices, pages that answer real questions with real numbers: classic search has rewarded all of it for years, and it is also most of what gets a business cited in an AI answer. Add the parts search always rewarded indirectly, reviews and third-party mentions, and the overlap is nearly the whole job. That is the practical takeaway: you do not need three separate projects, you need one body of work done properly.
Different surface, different measurement, different tempo.
The surface
SEO earns you a position in a list of links. AEO and GEO earn you a place inside the answer itself, where there are two or three names and no page two.
The measurement
SEO counts rankings and clicks. AEO counts mentions and citations: which questions name you, which sources the answer drew on. Each assistant also reads its own corner of the web; only about 11% of cited domains overlap between ChatGPT and Perplexity (Profound, 100,000-prompt study).
The tempo
Rankings drift over months. Assistant answers can change whenever the model re-reads the web, which is why a measured before-and-after every week tells you more than a monthly ranking report.
Buy the work, not the acronym.
If someone sells you AEO, GEO and SEO as three separate line items, you are paying for the same work three times. What matters is whether the provider shows you the actual answers, hands you the changes ready to publish, and measures whether anything moved. We wrote up how we do exactly that on how it works, and the short definitions live in the glossary.
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