By Adverito5 min read
Three names, three different jobs
Search has changed shape more in the past two years than it did in the decade before it. People still type queries into Google, but they also ask a voice assistant out loud, and increasingly they paste a question into ChatGPT or Gemini and read a generated reply instead of clicking through a list of links. Three acronyms have grown up around those habits: SEO, AEO and GEO.
They are used interchangeably far too often, which is unhelpful, because each one answers a different question. Treating them as a single discipline leads to confused priorities and, worse, to buying a package that promises all three without ever explaining what any of them means.
SEO: ranking in traditional search results
Search Engine Optimisation is the oldest of the three and the easiest to verify. It is the work of making a website appear in Google's traditional organic results when someone types a query. The levers are well known: a site that crawls and indexes cleanly, pages that match what the searcher actually wants, clear titles and headings, fast load times on mobile, and enough authority — built through genuine expertise and references from other credible sites — for Google to trust a page enough to show it.
SEO is measurable in a straightforward way. Google Search Console shows which queries brought impressions and clicks, which pages appeared for them, and whether a change moved either number. That measurability is also its limit: it measures the part of search that happens inside Google's results pages, not what happens after a voice assistant reads an answer aloud or a chatbot writes one.
AEO: being the direct answer
Answer Engine Optimisation is about being the source that a direct answer is built from. When Google shows a featured snippet above the results, when Siri or Google Assistant speaks a two-sentence reply, when an answer box names a business — that content came from somewhere. AEO is the work of making your page the somewhere.
The practical changes are modest but specific. Definitions work best as one clear sentence early on a page. Headings phrased as real questions help, because engines match them against the questions people actually ask. Structured data, a clean heading hierarchy, consistent business information and self-contained paragraphs all make a page easier to lift into an answer. A genuinely useful FAQ section — written around real customer questions rather than keyword volume — is the core of the discipline.
The honest caveat: engines choose which source to feature, and they change that choice regularly. AEO improves the odds of being selected. It does not guarantee selection, and nobody can promise you the snippet.
GEO: being cited inside AI chat answers
Generative Engine Optimisation covers the newer surface: the answers written by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and similar tools. These systems do not return a ranked list of ten links. They synthesise a reply and, when they are working well, mention or link the sources they drew on. GEO is the discipline of being one of those sources.
The overlap with SEO is large — an AI system cannot cite a page it cannot crawl and understand — but the emphasis shifts. Models tend to repeat information that appears consistently in several places: your own site, directories, review platforms, news coverage and industry listings. So GEO leans on the same technical foundations plus corroboration: publish clear, specific, attributable claims, keep your business details identical wherever they appear, and earn mentions from sites that already cover your space.
Where the three overlap
Strip away the acronyms and the shared foundation is obvious: a fast, crawlable site with clean structure, content that answers real questions in plain language, business information stated identically wherever it appears, and credibility that comes from work you can actually show. Work done on that foundation serves all three at once, which is why chasing them as separate purchased products usually wastes money.
- SEO optimises for a ranked list of links; AEO optimises for a single extracted answer; GEO optimises for inclusion in a generated response.
- SEO and AEO are measured in Search Console and on the results page; GEO is checked by asking the tools directly and seeing who gets named.
- All three fail on the same faults: thin content, slow pages, contradictory business details and claims nobody can verify.
How to prioritise without overspending
Sequence beats simultaneity. Fix the technical foundation first, because everything else depends on it. Then publish content that answers your customers' real questions in plain language, with a clear definition near the top of each page — that single habit serves both SEO and AEO. Keep your name, address, phone number, services and descriptions consistent across your site, your profiles and your listings, because both crawlers and models resolve contradictions by ignoring you.
Then measure honestly. Track rankings and clicks in Google Search Console, check whether your pages surface for the questions you care about, and ask the chat tools the questions your customers ask. Expect movement to be slow and uneven. Anyone promising guaranteed rankings, guaranteed citations or guaranteed leads in any of these channels is describing something nobody in this industry can control.
If you want the longer version of each discipline, our pages on SEO, AEO and GEO explain how we approach them and what is realistically involved.