AEO vs GEO vs SEO: what's actually different (and what to do about each)

SEO gets you into the list of links. AEO and GEO get your name into the AI answer, and they are the same thing wearing two labels. The honest breakdown, a side-by-side table, and what to do about each.

There are suddenly a lot of two- and three-letter acronyms flying around: SEO, AEO, GEO, AIO, and more. Most articles either treat them as identical or invent fine distinctions to sound smart. Here is the honest version: what each one actually means, where they overlap, and what you should do about each.

The one-sentence version

SEO gets you a spot in the list of blue links on a search results page.
AEO gets your name into a written answer (Google's AI Overview, an AI assistant, a voice reply).
GEO is the same goal as AEO, named from the "generative" side. In practice the two words are used interchangeably.

If someone tells you AEO and GEO are deeply different disciplines, be skeptical. They describe the same job: be named in the answer. SEO is the one that is genuinely a different target.

SEO: ranking in the list of links

The classic game. Search engines return ten links, and you optimize your pages, your keywords, and your backlinks to rank as high as possible in that list. The win condition is a position in a list, and the click is yours to earn.

SEO is not dead. Plenty of searches still return links, and the same fundamentals (useful content, a technically sound site, other sites linking to you) still matter. But a growing share of searches now show an AI answer above the links, and that answer is a different battlefield.

AEO / GEO: getting named in the answer

When someone asks an AI assistant, or sees Google's AI Overview, they get a paragraph with a few names in it, not ten links. The win condition here is being one of those names. There is no scrolling to find you; you are either in the sentence or you are invisible.

The crucial difference in how you win: AI answers are assembled from sources the engine reads at the moment it answers, and those sources are overwhelmingly third-party pages, review articles, list posts, Reddit, YouTube, not your own website. (We measured this across 48 answers and six engines; the engines barely touched company sites. See the study.) So AEO leans harder on "get mentioned in the pages the AI trusts" than on tuning your own site.

Side by side

	SEO	AEO / GEO
Win condition	Rank in a list of links	Be named in the written answer
Where it shows	Search results page	AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, voice
You win mostly by	Your own site + backlinks	Third-party sources the AI reads
How you measure	Keyword rankings	Share of AI answers that name you
Result of losing	You are lower in the list	You do not appear at all

What about AIO, GAIO, AISO, LLMO...

These are all the same idea (optimizing for AI answers) wearing different labels, plus one point of genuine confusion worth flagging: AIO sometimes means "AI optimization" (the discipline) and sometimes means Google's "AI Overviews" (a specific feature). When you see it, check which one is meant. Otherwise, do not lose sleep over the alphabet soup. The work does not change with the acronym.

What to actually do about each

For SEO: keep doing the fundamentals. A useful, fast, well-structured site that earns links is still the foundation, and it is also what makes you quotable by AI. Do not abandon it.

For AEO / GEO: shift some energy from "tune my own pages" to "get into the pages the AI reads." Find the articles that rank for your buying questions and get your business added. Show up honestly on Reddit and YouTube. Keep your facts consistent everywhere. Our answer engine optimization guide walks through the specific moves.

For all of it: measure. SEO has had rank trackers for twenty years. AEO needs its own kind of tracking, because "am I named in the answer" is a different question with a different answer. SearchVis tracks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Claude and Grok name your business, and there is a free tier to see where you stand.

The takeaway

Do not treat AEO and GEO as rival philosophies; they are the same goal. Do treat AEO as genuinely distinct from SEO, because the answer box plays by different rules than the link list. Keep the SEO foundation, add the AEO layer on top, and measure both.