AEO, GEO and SEO: How the Three Disciplines Fit Together

Every few years, marketing acquires a new three-letter acronym, and a small industry forms around explaining what it means. This time we have two of them at once. AEO and GEO have arrived together, both of them adjacent to SEO, both of them genuinely different, and neither of them quite settled in its definition.

This article is an attempt to bring some order to the conversation. The aim is not to declare a winner. It is to help a working marketer decide which work to do, when, and why.

The short version

SEO is the practice of being found in a ranked list of links. AEO is the practice of being chosen as the answer when a system responds to a question. GEO is the practice of being represented well by a generative model's answer, whether that answer cites sources or not. All three matter, in different proportions, for different brands.

That is the headline. The rest of this piece is the texture.

SEO: the discipline you already know

Search Engine Optimisation is the oldest of the three. Its goal is to influence the ordering of pages returned for a query on a search engine, principally Google. Its tools are familiar. Crawlable site architecture, useful content, structured data, internal links, backlinks, page speed, mobile usability, and, increasingly, the soft signals that surround a brand on the open web.

SEO is still, by some distance, the largest of the three disciplines by spend, by talent pool, and by direct revenue impact for most businesses. Reports of its death have been exaggerated for fifteen years and continue to be exaggerated now. People still type things into Google. They still click links. They will keep doing so for a long time.

What has changed is that SEO is no longer the only discipline that decides who customers find. It has, for the first time in two decades, real neighbours.

AEO: optimising for the answer

Answer Engine Optimisation focuses on the systems that respond to a user's question with a synthesised answer rather than a list of links. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek are the most-used answer engines today. Google's AI Overviews are an answer engine layered on top of classical search.

The mechanics of AEO are different from SEO in three useful ways.

First, the unit of victory is different. In SEO, the unit is a position on a results page. In AEO, the unit is a citation: a mention by name, ideally with the kind of surrounding context that nudges the user toward a decision.

Second, the inputs are wider. AEO benefits from many of the same signals as SEO, particularly structured data and quality content, but it also relies on sources that classical SEO largely ignores. Industry registers, Wikipedia, review platforms, podcast transcripts, and the broader sweep of the open web all matter more to an answer engine than they do to a ranking algorithm.

Third, the failure modes are different. An SEO failure looks like slipping from page one to page two. An AEO failure looks like being absent from a confident answer that names two competitors instead of you, or worse, being present in an answer that gets a fact about you slightly wrong.

GEO: optimising for the model's view of you

Generative Engine Optimisation overlaps with AEO heavily, and many practitioners use the terms interchangeably. The useful distinction, when one is being drawn, is one of scope.

AEO is usually framed as the work of getting cited. GEO is sometimes framed more broadly as the work of being represented accurately and favourably by a generative model, whether or not that model produces a visible citation.

In practice this means GEO pays more attention to things like brand description, sentiment, the consistency of the brand's positioning across the open web, and what a model says about a brand when the user does not ask for a citation at all. If a model has internalised an out-of-date or simply wrong story about a brand, GEO is the work of correcting it.

For most working brands, AEO and GEO are best thought of as two faces of the same coin. The same actions tend to help with both. The clearest reason to keep the terms separate is academic precision, and the field will most likely consolidate on one of them within a year or two.

How the three disciplines relate

Picture three concentric circles, but not quite concentric.

The outermost circle is the open web: the entire surface that any of these systems can read. The middle circle is the set of sources a generative system has actually digested or can reach at query time. The innermost circle is the set of sources a classical search engine ranks.

SEO works on the innermost circle. AEO and GEO work on the middle circle. Both circles sit inside the outermost one, and a brand that ignores the open web in general will struggle with all three.

Two practical consequences fall out of this picture.

The first is that SEO work and AEO work are correlated but not identical. A page that ranks well on Google is more likely to be cited by an AI system than a page that does not exist. But many pages that rank poorly on Google are cited heavily by AI, and many top-ranked pages are quietly ignored by every AI system. The overlap is real but partial.

The second is that some kinds of work pay off in all three disciplines at once. Cleaning up a Wikipedia entry, earning a credible review, fixing structured data, getting cited in a respected industry register: these are useful for SEO, for AEO, and for GEO. Other kinds of work are more specific. Optimising image alt text helps SEO but rarely helps AEO. Earning a quote in a niche industry podcast can lift AEO and GEO without moving SEO at all.

Where to spend, and in what order

A reasonable rule of thumb for a brand with limited time and budget runs as follows.

If you have not yet got the SEO basics in order, start there. AEO and GEO will not rescue a site that is invisible to Google. The plumbing has to work.

If your SEO is in good shape and your category is one where AI usage is already common, treat AEO as the next investment. Examples include software, professional services, finance, health, travel, technology, education, and large parts of retail. In these categories the share of buying-intent traffic that begins inside an AI conversation is already material.

If your brand has a reputation problem, a category-fit problem, or simply a slightly stale story being told about it on the open web, GEO is the work that will move the needle. The first job of GEO is usually corrective, not promotional.

For most teams the practical answer is not to choose, but to sequence. SEO continues. AEO begins. GEO becomes a quiet ongoing concern.

Why the names matter less than the measurement

There will probably be one more round of acronym debate before the dust settles. Some will argue for AEO, some for GEO, some for a new term entirely. The truth is that the boundaries are porous and the work overlaps.

What matters more than the label is the measurement. A brand that knows which engines cite it for which prompts, how that changes over time, and which actions move the numbers is doing real work, whatever it is called. A brand that cannot say any of those things is being talked at by consultants.

The next article in this series looks at how AI search engines actually decide who to cite, because the answer is more interesting, and more useful, than the typical explanation suggests.

Common questions

Is AEO replacing SEO? No. AEO is becoming a peer discipline. The most likely future is that both grow, in parallel, with shared underlying signals and distinct measurement.

Do GEO and AEO need separate teams? Almost never. The same person or team can do both, particularly in the early years of the field.

Does Google AI Overviews count as AEO or SEO? Practically, both. Google's AI Overviews are an answer engine sitting on top of a search engine. Optimising for them benefits from classical SEO hygiene and from the wider AEO toolkit.

What is the single best first move for AEO or GEO? Establish a baseline. Without one, you cannot tell whether anything you do is working.